


down on my knees, but not to pray--hit so hard across the skull, it buckled my legs

by cashtastrophe



Series: i cannot see three feet in front of me [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Bad BDSM Etiquette, Child Abuse, Daddy Issues, Daddy Kink, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Extremely Dubious Consent, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Incest, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Porn With Plot, Someone Help Will Graham, Suicide Attempt, Underage Rape/Non-con, Will Figures It Out
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 04:52:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 47,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1969737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashtastrophe/pseuds/cashtastrophe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This isn’t what it should be like</i>, Will thinks wildly, because of course he’s thought about it. Of course. Will can count on one hand the number of people that have been kind to him, and he’s tried to fuck every one, so Hannibal’s no exception, but Will thought there would be more…composure, maybe. The same graceful approach Hannibal had to everything else in his life. </p><p>Surely he hadn’t treated Alana like this—if he had, and she’d come back for round two, Will has deeply misjudged her.</p><p>*<br/> <br/>In which Hannibal tries to be kind and Will, well.  He just <i>tries</i>.</p><p>(tentatively off hiatus)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. you had nine lives and one by one you chewed 'em up

**Author's Note:**

> it's just self-indulgent angst porn. creepy, self-indulgent angst porn. there's no pairing tag for will/will's dad (because the rest of y'all aren't total trash, I assume) but heads up, that's a thing. 
> 
> I'm so, so sorry.

Will figures it out at the worst possible time, of course.

 

He’s known Hannibal nearly half a year now, by this point, enough time to see a couple of repeats in the rotation of the man’s near-infinite suit collection, enough time to know that Hannibal’s real smile just touches his eyes, barely there, visible only if you know where to look.  And Will’s supposed to be a genius, isn’t he, he should have figured this out months ago, except he’s the sort of guy with just rotten, gypsy-curse luck because it wasn’t during a case.  It wasn’t in the middle of a dinner party, during one of the lavish meals Hannibal had so often—and so happily—prepared for him.  He didn’t slide a bite of meat between his teeth and pause with his canines half-sunk in already and realize _oh_ and then _oh, this used to be a person_.

 

No.  Will isn’t that fortunate.  He doesn’t even have his gun on him—well he does, of course, he never really goes without it these days, not since kidnapping’s become so par for the course.  But it was clipped to his belt in full view like a good little agent’s gun should be, and his belt’s still threaded through the loops of his jeans which are—somewhere.

 

Somewhere on the other side of Doctor Lecter’s office, he thinks.

 

Because Will is pressed, belly-down, to the slick surface of Hannibal’s desk.  The desk is, like everything else Hannibal owns, beautifully handcrafted and spectacularly outside of Will’s price range.  The minutely-carved curlicues of the floral detail at the desk’s edge is biting into his hips all messy, leaving behind splotchy petal-marks that blend together to look more like teeth.  Will stares, blank, at the dirt under his nails and in the creases of his knuckles and he isn’t sure it’s real.  He’d been washing the dogs earlier that day, but surely he’d have washed before his appointment.  Surely he wasn’t that far gone, not yet, not enough to be forgetting personal hygiene already.  But then his hands slip, slick with still-warm blood and he’s soaked in it, crimson to the elbows.  He grunts as his pelvis rocks hard against the desk’s edge and he only knows the blood on his hand’s isn’t real because when he scrabbles for purchase at Hannibal’s neat piles of carefully-penned notes, the pages stay clean.

 

Hannibal’s grip on him doesn’t waver.  The grip is also—harder than Will would have thought, honestly.  Hannibal has always been gentle with him, mild, almost soft-spoken.  When he touched Will, he touched the way one would touch a frightened dog.   Except now his hands are digging blunt fingernails into bloody crescents across his hipbones and Will hasn’t thought about this much, granted, but he thought Hannibal’s hands would be softer.  Smoother.  Artist’s hands.  

 

But there’s thick pads of calluses rubbing at the soft places inside the cradle of his legs, rasping against the trail of coarse hair mapping the curve of Will’s belly.  Hannibal’s hands are surprisingly rough, his grip bruising, like he maybe doesn’t realize how hard he’s holding on.  Like he’s used to brute force, used to pushing and prying and bending.  Will’s joints creak in protest as the thigh heavy between his legs nudges them further apart, coaxes him back into hands deceptively strong, for a man who plays a _harpsichord._

 

They’d been talking about Will’s father, which isn’t actually a train of thought he’d like to follow anywhere, thanks, not with the solid weight of Hannibal’s broad body at his back, not with the doctor’s teeth buried in the thick muscle of Will’s trapezius.  Not with his cock hard and burning a thick line against Will’s tailbone.

 

“Will,” Hannibal breathes, soft and almost lilting in that odd half-accent of his.  He says Will’s name so carefully.  Like he’s got a mouth full of blood.

 

Hannibal sucks at the side of Will’s neck with a delicate scrape of teeth and Will forgets that Hannibal says anything at all.

 

They’d been talking about his father and Will had slipped himself, shamefully, sideways and backwards fifteen years to the syrupy husk of his own accent.  It’s unconscious, the way he slides over consonants and leans heavy on his vowels.  He garbles Hannibal’s first name, he’s sure, but he’d been saying…something.  Something important, probably, something about the work or a case or anything but the tragic interior of his own head, but he’d been thinking about his father’s hands.  Dock worker’s hands, callused and deeply tanned and weatherworn, strong as steel as they braced against Will’s bird-boned shoulders, against the baby curve of them, and pressed him down to bruised knees.

 

“My father fucked me,” Will says aloud, and it surprises even him.  It doesn’t sound remotely like Will Graham, PhD, with his careful pronunciation (because Will Graham, PhD knows what it’s like to be poor, but the experience is only noble if he carries none of it with him once his education had civilized him.)  This is Willy, little Will, with the sleepy drawl and the skinny wrists and honey-warm eyes, bruised like bites taken from a peach all down his thighs.  Willy, who knows what shade of Momma’s foundation makes the teachers stop asking questions, and has a dozen excuses on hand for the scuffed knees of all his jeans, the scuffed skin of the knees themselves.  His voice doesn’t waver.

 

Hannibal merely watches him.  Doesn’t say a word.

 

He leans forward, though, pushes past the invisible line Will had stamped into the carpet ten minutes into their first session.  The line’s imaginary, of course, always been in Will’s head, but it’s the first time Hannibal has crossed it nonetheless.  Their relationship has never been tactile.

 

Hannibal leans in, and suddenly he’s on his knees in front of Will’s chair, and he’s—he’s looking up at Will like he’s a Rembrandt.  Like he’s a masterpiece, like it’s an honest privilege to be where Hannibal is right now, ruining the lines of a perfectly good suit just to crouch before Will’s bedraggled self.  There’s a disarming heat in those shark eyes, and Will doesn’t think he’s ever noticed the color before—brown, so deep as to be nearly black.  An indecipherable colour, like a pool of blood.  How has he never looked Hannibal in the eyes before?

 

It doesn’t matter about ten seconds after, though, because Hannibal’s biting the confession from his mouth.  Swallows.  Grips the sides of Will’s jaw, presses into the hungry angle of bone like he never plans on letting go and kisses Will like it’s a foregone conclusion.

 

Will shudders.

 

“Tell me,” Hannibal whispers as he breaks away and draws back.  “Tell me,” he murmurs into Will’s five-day stubble. He licks the spot just behind Will’s ear where his jaw hinges and he lingers there, the flat of his tongue pressed to Will’s pulse.

 

“Tell you what?” Will asks, dazed.  His vision’s blurry even though he’s wearing his glasses—jumpy and strange, like he’s buzzing.  He blinks, slow, as teeth replace tongue and Hannibal bites a livid mark into Will’s neck well above the collar, sucks at it until the it throbs in time with the pulse in Will’s cock.

 

“Tell me,” Hannibal repeats, and his hands shove into the warmth of Will’s jacket, skimming under the layers of plaid to find a soft, worn t-shirt.  Hannibal is broader than he looks—the perfect tailoring of his suit somehow conceals the bulk of him, but as he shifts between Will’s thighs, Will has to part his legs quite a bit to accommodate.

 

Will huffs out a laugh, then, as Hannibal’s blunt fingertips find their way under the skin-warmed fabric of his shirt.  Will shivers as the shirt slides up, as rough fingers catch the thin skin of his ribcage.  “I knew it,” he says, as Hannibal shoves his shirt up and noses into the slope of his belly.  “I knew there had to be something wrong with you,” he says, and it doesn’t sound right, even as he says it—because there’s something wrong, okay.  “Is that what you’re into? Little boys?”

 

That isn’t it, though, isn’t it, isn’t _it_ , and the clinical, assessing look on Hannibal’s face tells Will as much.  He draws back and fixes Will with a look that twists guilt into his stomach and he wants to, absurdly, apologize for the idea.  “Nothing so pedestrian,” Hannibal says, finally.  “My interest, dear Will, lies solely in you—not in children, as you’ve so crassly assessed.”  Will swallows.  “I merely wish,” Hannibal continues, and resumes his exploration of Will’s belly with tongue and teeth,  “To understand the ways in which you are so exquisitely broken.”

 

Will’s skin crawls at that, but his cock gives a sick, unwarranted little jump where it’s pressed against Hannibal’s breastbone.  Hannibal’s smile shows too many teeth.  “I was ten,” Will starts, and is rewarded by that open mouth hot against the tender place below his stomach.  “I was ten,” he repeats, and doesn’t know where to go from there.

 

“Your mother—she was deceased by this point?”  Hannibal rumbles the words right into his skin and Will can feel the words in the core of him, down to where they tingle star-bright in the tips of his fingers. 

 

He’s on _fire_.

 

“No,” Will groans, and Hannibal pauses.  They’ve never discussed his family.  Hannibal’s never asked.  “She was—gone, most of the time.  She—she drank.”  His hips jerks as he hitches up, so very slightly into where Hannibal is pressed against him.  “But she was alive.  She—she knew.”  His eyes squeeze shut then, and a moan rattles somewhere from deep inside his ribcage.

 

“Everyone knew,” he continues.  “Shit, Hannibal, we were _trailer trash_ from _Louisiana_ , you can’t—I mean, it can’t be a surprise.”

 

“It isn’t,” Hannibal admits as his hand slides up Will’s thigh to cup against him through his jeans.  Will whines, high and needy.  “You’ve been so forthcoming with your self-deprecation this far.  I never imagined you were hiding something.”

 

He sounds pleased.

 

Will bucks into the touch.  “I’m surprised you didn’t see it,” he pants, ragged.  “Is it the autism spectrum that confused you?  That gets a lot of people—it got Alana.  The manifestation of— _ohfuck_ do that again,” he pleads, and Hannibal strokes along the hard line of his cock obligingly.  “The manifestation of sexual trauma looks so similar anyways,” Will continues.  “Aversion to eye contact, loud noises.”  He jerks his hips up again with a low hiss, as Hannibal bends to press his mouth to the aching curve of Will where he’s pressed against the zipper of his jeans.  “Unwillingness to be touched,” he finishes.  “I was ten,” he says, and doesn’t know how to continue past that, because no one has ever asked before.

 

He’s never told this story, not even to himself.  And he is—he admits, as Hannibal’s tongue drags down his cock, warm and sure and more contact than he’s had in _months_ —an unreliable narrator, at best.

 

He recounts, though, in shuddering gasps as Hannibal strokes at him through his jeans, alternating between hand and tongue, what his father had done to him.  How his father, too young for _any_ child, never mind one as challenging as Will, had crawled into a bottle the day Will’s poor sad, sweet mother had slit her wrists in the bathtub and never quite crawled out.

 

Momma spent her days in a chemical bliss after that, little pills dotted all down the medicine cabinet.  They kept her quiet.  Kept Will quiet, too, those nights Daddy wanted him smooth and easy and pliant.  No matter how much he screamed inside, his jaw was locked up tight and he didn’t make a sound and Daddy was so _proud_.

 

Will had been ten.

 

Will had been ten and he’d looked too much like the woman Daddy had loved, all soft eyes and softer hair.  He can still smell the acrid tang of bottom-shelf whiskey, the kind that came in a crinkly plastic bottle with the screw-off cap.  He can smell it in Hannibal’s sweat as it drips into the arch of his lower back, he can taste in the back of his throat as the man ruts at him—

 

—except this isn’t Dad and he isn’t ten, and Hannibal might be old enough to be his father but he isn’t, he _isn’t_.

 

Will reminds himself of that as Hannibal’s large hand closes over his throat.  “You’re here,” Hannibal says.  “Be here.”

 

And Will is.  He’s here as Hannibal—slowly, reverently, _creepily,_ as though he’s unwrapping a gift he’s waited a long time for—strips him of his clothes.  They hang, for a bit, with Will barefoot in unzipped jeans and Hannibal still mostly-clothed, his shirt unbuttoned all the way down the front.  Will sinks to his knees automatically, without asking or being asked, as though this was the only logical next step.

 

And so Hannibal, who has never let his professionalism slip quite this badly that he can recall, reclines in the leather chair behind his desk while Will crouches beneath, hidden by the wooden backing.  He must look ridiculous, he thinks, full-grown man half-naked and crammed under a piece of furniture, but Hannibal’s legs give way easily when Will slides between them.  He hesitates, though, hands on Hannibal’s cock, palming him through—what else?—black silk.

 

“I haven’t,” he mumbles, and licks his lips.  Doesn’t look up.  Studies his dirty, bloody fingers closed over the silk, notes the way the ragged skin of a bitten nail catches threads.  “It’s been a while,” he says finally and then there’s absolutely nothing else to say, because he’s slipping Hannibal’s waistband down and curling his fingers around the base of Hannibal’s cock, around the bit he can’t quite fit in his mouth.

 

Hannibal grunts softly, sounds almost surprised.  Will’s fingers of his free hand clench in the fabric of Hannibal’s trousers as he struggles to breathe through his nose, to relax his jaw the way Daddy taught him, to be a _good boy, you feel so good, you feel so—_

 

He only realizes he’s crying when Hannibal’s thumb trails the swollen, tight skin under his right eyes and Will blinks up as Hannibal touches the tears to his tongue.  

 

“Do you know who I am, Will? Where you are?”  It’s not fair for Hannibal to sound so steady while Will’s choking on his dick, but the tone is gentle and that’s—that’s how he knows, anyways, that it isn’t Daddy because Daddy sounds like ten years of cigarettes and bourbon dragged over gravel .

 

“Yes,” Will gasps out and licks at Hannibal again, long and slow and lingering over the crown where the skin’s flushed and hot.  Hannibal can’t make him talk if his mouth’s occupied, after all.

 

“I will not—“ Hannibal’s breath catches as Will swallows him down again and one hand snakes up to tangle in Will’s curls.  The hand cards through his hair, fond, manicured nails raking his scalp in a way that makes the wretched thing in him preen, press himself into the touch, he’s done _well_ , he’s been _good_.

 

“I will never force you to do anything you don’t wish to do, Will,” Hannibal continues, and his hand slides around to cradle the angle of Will’s jaw as he hollows his cheeks and tries to take Hannibal deeper just to stop him talking.  “Tell me you know that.”

 

It’s the closest Will’s going to get to an admission of anything here and, bizarrely, he kind of wants to laugh, kind of wants to cry.  Maybe both.  But he can’t do either with his mouth full of his psychiatrist’s cock, so.  He just tries to relax best he can, let his jaw go slack and loose and pliant.

 

“I am not your father,” Hannibal grinds out and that’s it, that’s too much—he’s coming so hard he sees black for a few beats, coming harder than he has in years, feels like, before he even really realizes he’s touched himself.

 

The sound he makes is embarrassing.  The way he shakes through it is worse.

 

Hannibal pulls out of his mouth at some point, but Will’s too busy trying to breathe to really catch when that happens.  When he comes back to himself, he’s belly-down again on the desk, this time with his jeans down around his knees and then the blunt press of Hannibal’s fingers, prying him open.

 

“I haven’t done this is a long time, either,” Will admits as the tip of a forefinger presses in.

 

“Forgive me,” Hannibal replies.  “I wasn’t expecting this.  I would have been adequately prepared, under better circumstances.”

 

It takes Will a second to process what he means, but then there’s the _click_ of a bottle being opened, and a heady, earthy pine scent Will recognizes as Hannibal’s hand lotion.

 

But it’s better than some things he’s had before, better than olive oil in the kitchen and conditioner in the shower and Daddy’s massive paw clamped hard over his mouth so he can’t scream, and Will bets it’s organic, even, small-batch hand cream cold-pressed by a family-owned business of good, honest people eight generations old.  Except Will can’t, he can’t slip into thinking about them, can’t slip off into the even pattern of a metronome, can’t focus on anything but the incessant burn as Hannibal slides a finger inside to the second knuckle.

 

It doesn’t hurt.  This is less than Will’s done to himself, honestly, but the angle’s odd.  Unfamiliar.  Will  makes a low, vague kind of noise in his throat and cants his hips up and back, arching into Hannibal.

 

“Good,” Hannibal murmurs, and brushes a kiss along the jutting-out bones of Will’s lower back.as he’s curling that finger deeper, deeper until it catches something that _sparks_ and then—

 

Then, when Will cries out raggedly, Hannibal pushes in with just too much force, just enough to send Will crashing down on the desk top, his still-bloodied hands giving way beneath him.  He stays there, braced on chin and chest, fingers white-knuckled in the ruins of Hannibal’s case notes as the good doctor shoves into him.

 

It’s simultaneously far too much and not nearly enough, and Will bucks backwards almost savagely, with a choked “Please, _please_.”

 

When Hannibal is fully inside, seated with his hips flush to the swell of Will’s ass, he sighs—a delicate thing, contented, breathed hot into the back of Will’s neck.  Too sweet, too soft for the animal way his body crowds into Will’s, the way Will tenses and flexes and shivers around him.

 

Will wasn’t exaggerating.  It had been years.  Since undergrad, at least, with that sophomore roommate—what was his name? Jason? Josh?  Will thinks it’s Josh but he’s isn’t a hundred percent on that, and he can’t remember if Josh was blonde or not, probably couldn’t pick him out of a one-person lineup, but he remembers what the guy’s dick felt like, well enough.  They’d downed a bottle of Captain Morgan between them the first time, underaged and desperate to feel something beyond their terrible, fumbling teenage selves.  And they hadn’t known what to do, either of them, because Will’s experience with how to do it properly was questionable and Josh’s nonexistent, so Josh had just unceremoniously shoved into Will with a cursory bit of spit-slick fingering that did nothing for the tension of Will’s muscles.  Just shoved right in with that coke-can dick of his, and Will had tore and bled and come like a fucking freight train when Josh’d hooked a crushing elbow around his windpipe.

 

The sex wasn’t the weird thing, in the end—Josh hadn’t really given a shit.  They never talked about what it made them or where they stood and that’s as it should have been, probably, because it really wasn’t much more than an occasional thing.  Normal stuff.  College stuff.

 

No, what fucked it up was Will.  As usual.  Josh tried, really, he tried to not make it a _thing_ the way he’d been balls-deep inside the guy he was supposed to share living quarters with for the next year.  He was trying to have that completely boring, average experience of messing around with a guy he, realistically, would never have to see after graduation.

 

Predictably, Will made it weird.

 

Will guided Josh’s hands around his wrists, his throat, wound Josh’s unwilling fingers in his own hair and pulled hard enough to prick tears at the corners of his eyes.  He bruised himself eagerly on Josh’s bones, drove himself frantically down and down and down onto Josh’s cock with barely any encouragement, whispering things like _fuck me_ and _bite me_ and on one occasion Will would rather not think about, _please, Daddy, oh please_.

 

Josh didn’t touch him for a month after that.

 

In the end, though, Will waited out the storm and stole a handle of Jack from the liquor store around the corner from their dorm and sucked Josh’s dick in their tiny galley kitchen and just like that, he was welcomed back into the other twin bed.

 

They didn’t push the beds together.  There was no need.  Will retreated back to his side of the dorm the moment Josh shuddered out an approximation of his name.  Sometimes—most times—he didn't even get off until he was back on his own bed, fist curled around his aching cock and three fingers pushed into slicked, soft wetness.  Jason watched him those nights, eyes hooded, predatory, as Will jerked himself off, smirked the wet point of his tongue into the corner of his mouth.

 

Will was fairly sure there had been pictures a few times, when he was too drunk to stay upright, never mind protest the shots.  

 

Hannibal, he is sure, would not appreciate the comparison.

 

“Fuck me,” he snarls, because he wants the same fucking thing from Hannibal he’d wanted from Josh—to be held down, pinned and _taken_ , branded, claimed, pushed too hard to have to think, to pause, to overanalyze.  “Please, Hannibal, for God’s sake, just _fuck me_.”

 

Blessedly, Hannibal _does_.

 

This, this is how he solves it.  Facedown on Hannibal’s desk with his jeans scrunched down around his knees, being pounded into the hard surface by a man not quite old enough to be his father, Will Graham solves the worst serial killer case the FBI’s seen in a decade.  Maybe more.

 

It’s something in the way Hannibal holds him like he’s holding Will _down_ , the way his hips snap into Will’s with no apparent regard for the choked, pained noises Will makes every time the desk edge bites into him.

 

_This isn’t what it should be like_ , Will thinks wildly, because of course he’s thought about it.  Of course.  Will can count on one hand the number of people that have been kind to him, and he’s tried to fuck every one, so Hannibal’s no exception, but Will thought there would be more…composure, maybe.  The same graceful approach Hannibal had to everything else in his life.  Surely he hadn’t treated Alana like this—if he had, and she’d come back for round two, Will has deeply misjudged her.

 

Hannibal thrusts into him ruthlessly, just on the edge of manic, and, well.  It hurts.  Of course it hurts, Hannibal is thick and muscled and more than capable of maneuvering Will’s skinny frame anywhere he likes.

 

It’s not a bright pain like the way Hannibal’s teeth close on his skin, but it sizzles all along his nerves, electric, and he _pushes_ into it when Hannibal’s hands take a firm hold of him and spread him further apart, shoves himself back like he’s desperate for this man—this creature, this _killer_ that somehow knows all the secrets Will’s never been able to put into anything more than awkward metaphor—to crawl inside him and make a home there.

 

_He already has,_ Will thinks abruptly as Hannibal drags a hand rough-fingered over his bare cock.  _I know him, I’ve been him, he’s_ in me.

 

Hannibal’s hand abandons its post between his legs shortly after and curls into his hair instead, curls tight and _pulls._

 

And just like that, hanging half off Hannibal’s desk with his neck arched into a tight, painful curve, Will realizes it can’t be anyone else.  Hannibal’s the only one that makes sense, the only one that ever did, how did they never see it, how—

 

It’s this, though, the way Hannibal snarls hotly into his ear, a wordless animal thing, as Will scrunches his eyes shut and chokes on the sob lodged in the back of his throat.  It’s this, thnat really makes him understand.

 

Because before this moment, before the unkind way Hannibal shoves his face into the unforgiving surface of the desk even as Will wriggles in protest, he never would have thought Hannibal capable of this kind of violence.

 

Hannibal had always struck him as being above this, maybe.  Always appeared so unruffled, so collected, so unbothered by the bloodied horrors in Will’s head.  So willing to be the cool, neutral response to Will’s fevered half-hallucinations.  And the whole time, Will had been sitting not six feet from the very monster whose mind he wallowed around in for a paycheck that wasn’t even close to worth it.

 

He remembers, distantly, describing the scene to Hannibal, the one left just for him, remembers the awkward poetry in the way he’d tried to explain it.  Hannibal had smiled, wide.  Encouraging, Will thought at the time.  Kind.  Waiting for him to continue.

 

Will wonders now if Hannibal got off on that.

 

“Will,” Hannibal growls into the thin skin of his carotid, the sharp angle of his nose pressing in too hard.  “Where have you gone, Will?”

 

He kisses the underside of Will’s throat in mocking contrast to the punishing way he drags Will back onto his cock by the hair, oblivious—or maybe uncaring—to the pathetic way it makes Will whimper.

 

He maybe didn’t expect someone so refined to be so…carnal?

 

Because he is.  He fucks like a beast, his larger body crushing into all the paralyzed angles of Will.  And Will’s been with men since Jason, okay, had his fair share of questionable bedmates, but Hannibal bites into his skin like he’s starving and being offered his very first meal in weeks.  Will can’t stop thinking about the pristine white of the inside of Hannibal’s fridge.

 

There will be no blood, he’s sure.  No one will ever know.  

 

This is how he’s going to die.

 

He knows it, animal certainty sure in his flushed skin, sure as the rough pull of Hannibal’s chest hair against his back.  He knows he is right for no reason he can really pinpoint, except that he always suspected there was something off abut Hannibal Lecter.

 

Because months ago, when Will had first begun to mumble out those staccato nightmares that have plagued him for years, long before he had any inclination they were real, Hannibal had smiled like a shark scenting blood in the water and all Will remembers is thinking _my, how sharp your teeth are_.

 

It’s a childish metaphor for a childish fear—he’s a _criminal profiler,_ okay, he knows there’s worse things than the big bad wolf—but those teeth scrape heavy along the knobs of his vertebrae.  Hannibal bites the nape of his neck like he’s staking a claim and Will was right, he was _right_.

 

“Will,” Hannibal says.  “William.”

 

Doesn’t sound a thing like dear old dad, really, doesn’t sound like _Willy, Willy, oh fuck, so good, that’s such a good boy, you feel so good, just like your momma_ , so Will jerks his head to the side best he can, snaps, “Wh— _fuck_ , what?”

 

“Stay with me,” is the only response he gets and then the hand in his hair shifts, knuckles under the curve of his ear just behind his jaw where Will knows it’ll hurt like a sonuvabitch if Hannibal presses his fingers in.

 

“I’m with you,” Will grinds out, wants to ask how he could be anywhere else, but what comes out instead (maybe it’s the heat, the way he burns everywhere Hannibal’s bare skin touches him) is, “You’re him.”  Hannibal pauses then, hips bucked up flush against Will.

 

“What?”  And that’s strange, isn’t it—Hannibal sounds _confused_ , bless him, sounds achingly, pathetically mortal, like any man who can’t understand why his dick isn’t the same distraction to the rest of the world that it is to him.  Hannibal’s breath is warm and sweet on Will’s neck, tickling the minute hairs there, and Will feels like he’s choking on the wet scent of pine needles.  He can feel them poking sharp, insistent, pricking into the tender skin of his bare back as he’s eased to the forest floor and—

 

“You’re the Ripper,” Will breathes and behind him, he hears an audible sound as Hannibal swallows.  Hannibal doesn’t say a word but his hand curls around Will—he’s hard again, when did that happen—and Will whines once more and fucks into the loose curl of Hannibal’s fingers.

 

It isn’t enough, it isn’t _enough_ and he feels like he might fall apart, scatter to pieces if Hannibal lets go of the way he’s got Will pinned to the desk like a dead butterfly.  “You’re him, you’re _him_ you’ve been him the whole time and you left her for me, didn’t you, the girl in the field and—“

 

That’s what does it.  And then he can’t speak anymore, can’t breathe properly, and of course that’s been a recurring theme tonight, except this time he can’t breathe because suddenly both of Hannibal’s hands are on his throat, crushing, pressing down down _down_ until Will’s vision goes dull and grey around the edges and there are these lights under his eyelids, popping and flashbulb-bright, sparking  as Hannibal thrusts up into his tense, terrified body once more, this time with a bitten-off snarl as he shudders and comes.

 

_This is it_ , Will thinks, quite clearly, as Hannibal’s grip closes impossible tighter and there’s a high-pitched buzzing in his ears.  He can barely hear what Hannibal’s hissing at him as his hips rock, arrhythmic, as he rides out the aftershocks, but it sounds like it’s in Lithuanian anyways, so Will thinks it probably doesn’t matter and anyways, _this is it._

 

But Hannibal lets go.

 

Hannibal lets go and slides so, so carefully out of Will, but Will groans anyways because he was too filled and now he’s too empty and he can still hear the frantic beat of his blood in his ears.  The way Hannibal’s fingers curl, gentle, over Will’s shoulders as he lifts him up, slides one powerful arm under his chest, that’s familiar.  It’s the tentative way Hannibal has always touched Will before this, the barest amount of pressure possible, as though he is not sure the touch will be welcomed.  And Will had thought it was a germ thing, maybe, or just good sense born from years of treating people as shattered as Will and worse, but.

 

Will thinks he understands now, maybe, that Hannibal does not understand the range of touch between a surgeon’s delicate precision and a rutting deer.  And doesn’t that make sense, for a killer doctor?  Hannibal can mend and Hannibal can bruise, but Hannibal can do nothing in between because he exists—truly, honestly, actually exists—only in those extremes.  Hannibal the cannibal.  Hannibal the animal.  

 

_What happened to you_ , Will does not ask, because he is so terrified the answer will be _Absolutely nothing, my dear._

 

He’s certainly the most elegant monster Will’s met.

 

Hannibal does him the cursory favor of tugging his jeans back up which is welcome, even if the slick mess running down his thighs isn’t made any more comfortable by the rasp of denim.  He steers Will gently towards the couch—a couch meant for prospective clients, for guests, all the way across the room from his usual solemn chair.  Will collapses into it gratefully.

 

He can’t button his jeans, never mind managing the belt.  His hands are shaking far too much for that.

 

“Will, I—“ Hannibal begins, and Will’s eyes cant over to his for the barest second.

 

“Admit it,” Will says softly.  He didn’t mean to.  “Just.”  Will shifts himself a little more upright, winces at the jolt of pain that stings its way up his lower back.  He tries to tug the two halves of his plaid shirt closed, hunched in on himself  as though it offers any protection with most of the buttons missing.  “Please.  I’m so tired.  I don’t want to play.  Not with you.”

 

He knows.  He knows it in his gut and his cock and the aching empty parts inside him where Hannibal was and the marks around his pale neck, pulsing in even time with the tempo of his pulse.  It is then he notices that his heart is racing.

 

He’s angry.  He’s not— _this isn’t fair,_ something young and terrified wails inside him.  Not fair, his only sanctuary, his old shelter, the only person in the world who has ever met Will’s eyes steadily as he unwinds the tangles of his awful insides and lays them out, flayed open in Technicolor, for the good doctor to pull apart and weave back together into something infinitely less terrible than Will himself.  He is the only person who has ever seen any nobility in Will’s suffering instead of just the unsteady way he shakes and rounds his shoulders and cannot make eye contact for the life of him.  

 

And, too, he has been inside Hannibal—well, the Ripper, okay, but it turns out it’s the same thing—in the most visceral way he knows.  He knows the bulk of the victims, the way Hannibal’s considerable shoulders must have strained, trying to haul the dead weight of the copycat corpse onto the points of the severed buck’s head.

 

Will had never been able to figure out if the Ripper had hunted the animal himself.  

 

But.  Hannibal would have.  Hannibal did.  Hunted her, too, and Will wondered if he ever fucked any of them beforehand, maybe before the murders Will’s been privy to, when Hannibal had been a fledgeling killer.  Wonders if Hannibal ever wanted to.  Because before today, his money would have been squarely on  Hannibal being distinctly above _wanting_.

 

Will, though.  Will wants to cry.  He wants to sleep.  He wants to drive the hour back to his small, lonely house and bundle himself to bed with his dogs all curled in around him and finish off the bottle of bourbon he’d started in on last night.  Wants to swallow the bottle of pale blue pills in his medicine cabinet, the ones that make everything cool and fuzzy and blessedly numb but give him a hell of a hangover and keep him too sluggish to work.  He wonders if he still has that stale joint, Ziplocked in the back of his junk drawers amid all the pens and paperclips he’s managed to absentmindedly smuggle home from the office over the years, wants that _snik_ of the lighter catching and the choking burn of smoke in his lungs.

 

Will wants to suffocate. Wants to drown.  Wants to do anything that will just stop Hannibal _looking_ at him like that.

 

“Don’t you dare lie to me,” he warns instead, venomous.

 

Hannibal does not smile.  “I took an oath, Will,” he reminds him, as though Will could possibly forget that he’s a doctor, when that’s the whole reason they’re here.  When Hannibal is supposed to be helping him and instead, he’s—

 

“Above all else, do no harm.”  Will’s mouth twists.  The words taste stale, like water left out overnight.  Metallic and warm.  Like a tooth's been knocked loose.

 

“If I were to hurt you, Will,” and Will wants to say _you have, my God, you have_ , “I believe that I would be doing a great deal of people significant harm.”

 

Will huffs out a ghost of a laugh. “Are you going to keep fucking me?” He tilts his head, meets Hannibal’s even gaze.  “Is this part of our sessions now, Doctor?”

 

“Not unless you wish it to be,” Hannibal says mildly.  “Although I feel I should remind you—technically speaking, I am not actually your psychiatrist.”  As though that were the line that had been crossed here, as though _that_ was the sin and this time, Will does laugh.

 

Well.  Tries to.  The noise that comes out isn’t right, and Will wishes fervently that he’d been able to see Hannibal’s face as he came.  He wants to see Hannibal shake apart and sweat and swear, wants to see that cool skin flushed red and tangible, hair in his face, jaw muscles tight as his teeth grind together.  Will wants that burned onto his retinas, tattooed on the insides of his eyelids because he’ll need it later.  He always does.  Needs to know if it happened, needs to play one more round of real-or-not-real because the ache inside him is a familiar enough demon that it isn’t exactly concrete proof.

 

“I would prefer the next time be in a different setting,” Hannibal says then, with a smile that crinkles his eyes into warm creases at the corners.  “Perhaps following dinner.  Or something less—“

 

“Traumatic?” Will suggests and he has no idea if he’s talking about the sex or the conversation.  His hands are trembling, though, and he shoves them under his thighs to stop it.  Stop Hannibal looking at them, anyways, although he doubts it went unnoticed.  He, for his part, doesn’t miss the way Hannibal talks about it as though he knows there will be a next time, as though Will’s crash into him was somehow inevitable.  Planned.  

 

Maybe it was.  

 

Maybe it still is.

 

Because Hannibal can’t be that much older than him, but when his hands fit neatly into the curves of Will’s shoulders and pull him, slowly easing him into Hannibal’s warm bulk,  as Will closes his eyes and breathes in Hannibal’s cologne and the faint musk of sweat, as Will shoves his nose into the hollow of Hannibal’s throat, he realizes he won’t say a fucking word because Will Graham learned to keep secrets at his Daddy’s knee, and, well.

 

It feels like coming home.

 


	2. bless me dark father, I have sinned--I've done it before and I'll do it again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> next up on trash party 2014: hannibal the cannibal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (also all titles of stuff are from various alkaline trio songs)

 

 

There is a saying, back in the country he will always call—however tentatively—home.  Roughly, in English, it means, "Those who raise no objection to something said or done are assumed to have acquiesced.”  That neatly slaughters the poetry of it, of course, the familiar oddity that comes only with having heard it so often too young to really question, but.  That, at least, gets the point across.  The absence of protest is equivalent to consent—an idea, he knows, fundamentally opposed to in his new homeland.

 

Hannibal knows better than that.  Hannibal remembers a dark-eyed little girl—his shadow, he remembers thinking as a child, his perfect tiny little shadow who looked up at him with adoration and a wide, wide, gaptoothed smile like she saw the face of God in her big brother—who was very, very good at saying _no._ Who was very good at _objecting_ and the very people who spoke that proverb to their own spawn cut her down anyways.  Cut her up.  

 

Hannibal can still taste her, some nights.

 

 

[He can now, in the hard line of muscles bracketing Will’s spine, in Will’s sweat, and he isn’t sure if he wants to vomit or press the flat of his tongue to Will’s skin in search of _more_.  Will whines when Hannibal compromises and bites him, hard, on the back of the shoulder.  It floods his palate, overwhelms even the cheap stink of Will’s aftershave, sharp and sour in the back of his throat.  He tastes just the same as she did, and Hannibal knows there is no such thing as _acquiescence_.

 

There is _take_ and _taken from_ because Will never says no to him, but the way he shakes and never meets Hannibal’s eyes afterwards for several long minutes, that isn’t exactly a resounding _yes_ , is it.

 

Will and Mischa both taste(d) like fear. Will, of course, is considerably less bloodied.

 

Hannibal gags on it anyways, but only just.  Will doesn’t seem to notice at all, however, or if he does, he’s used to his lovers being disgusted by him, because he slants a furious glare back over his shoulder, those sweet eyes narrowed into slits, teeth bared like he’s actually challenging Hannibal.  He lifts himself up, braces himself on the arms of Hannibal’s chair—Will’s chair, actually, but that’s neither here nor there—and slams himself down onto Hannibal at a punishing pace, over and over and over while the corded muscles in his back tense and pull and jump and it’s all Hannibal can do to hold onto him.  Each time he sinks down he makes a terrible noise, choked, and he’s biting his bottom lip near-bloody.  He is a wild thing, frantic, scrabbling at Hannibal’s bare thighs with his ragged, bitten nails and hissing _fuck me, for the love of whatever the fuck you believe in, Hannibal, c’mon, come on_ but Hannibal cannot figure out which of them he’s trying to punish.

 

“William,”  he says and that’s new too—he was always Will before, introduced like that and stays like that when he’s fully-dressed.  But he doesn’t seem to like being called that when he’s falling apart in Hannibal’s lap, and Hannibal is not an unnecessarily cruel man.  So William it is.  

 

Hannibal imagines _William_ belongs to a man who doesn’t breathe ragged and winded the way Will does, the way he pants furious, bitten-off curses into the curve of his own elbow where he hides his face best he can.  Hannibal imagines William might make soft, surprised little sounds, might meet Hannibal’s eyes and _not_ look so desperately as though he’d like to die.  William would kiss him more than that wretched first time, where Hannibal had dropped to his knees and learned what Will’s darkest parts tasted like bleeding out between his teeth.  William might stay, after, instead of restlessly shuffling to his feet to shower, as though it’ll wash away the fine tremors.  He murmurs it like a prayer into the hateful angle of Will’s arched neck.]

 

Hannibal is, if nothing else, acutely aware that he does not understand Will Graham as much as the man—and probably most of their mutual acquaintances, if he’s honest—seem to think.  The predictabilities of him are easy enough, of course: he drinks too much, he sleeps too little, and he’d likely swallow his own hunting rifle if he honestly believed it wouldn’t cause too big of an upset.

 

When they had first been introduced, Hannibal had shaken Will’s hand and it was (is) natural for a man in his line of work to read into a handshake.  Will’s was firm but unsteady, the barest tremor to his fingers, palm cool and dry like a corpse not two hours gone.  And when Hannibal glanced down, to the tiny sliver of skin bared between Will’s shirtsleeve and the ancient, cracked leather of his watchband, he found himself mildly surprised to find the the skin untouched.  Unmarked. Unscarred.

 

Will has never struck him as a man who particularly wants to live.

 

Later, of course, much later, because Hannibal cannot _see_ the way Will can, and must string Will together from the broken bits he allows Hannibal during their sessions, it will make sense.

 

Will has, as Hannibal concluded from the first thirty seconds of knowing him, always vaguely wanted to die. He has never said as much directly to Hannibal—likely, because he knows that would be good reason for pulling him off any FBI work at all, and what is the _point_ of being the way he is if he can’t _use_ it—but it isn’t hard to discern.  

 

Hannibal asked him, only once.  It is a standard procedure, a fair question, especially for a patient who speaks about himself with such precisely-honed self-loathing.  Will had merely blinked at him and frowned.  “You report to Jack,” he’d said, slowly, as though perhaps Hannibal had forgotten.  “You’ll forgive me if I’m wary of the question.”

 

Which wasn’t a _yes_ , granted, but Hannibal has been around the man enough to realize what he didn’t say was often as weighted as anything he spoke aloud.  Will, though, has always been unobtrusive, from the way he holds himself (shoulders rounded, eyes downcast, apologizing for taking up space, perhaps) to the way he dresses (outsized clothes that could have been passed down from his father, and knowing what he knows now, a good deal of them very likely were).  He wouldn’t take a theatrical exit.  Will sees no beauty in the sleek arch of a blade.  He barely seems to like handling his gun, and he’d never be so cruel as to leave his corpse hanging from the rafter where someone—likely himself, or Alana—would be able to find him.

 

[Hannibal’s lip curls at the thought, even as Will’s burning body is sinking down onto him.  Will sees it, of course, and he gives this _flinch_ throughout the whole of him, as though he thinks the sneer is for him, but it only makes him drive down harder, _harder,_ and Hannibal is only human, so he says nothing.]

 

More likely, Hannibal thinks, Will would slink off into the woods.  Hannibal thinks it would be pills [the ones he’d prescribed for the nightmares and the bloodied spots on Will’s palms where he’s dug his nails in too hard _again_ ] and liquor [ _whiskey_ , Will’s cried into the hollow of Hannibal’s throat, _always smelled like whiskey, Ah fuckin’ hate the way it tastes_ ] and a quiet, soft death out in the forest, hidden away like a sick dog.  He would never want—never allow—anyone to clean up his mess.  Better to let the flies take care of it.  Better to leave a mystery than a corpse.

 

Hannibal has never been able to decide if Will would leave a note.

 

He likes that about Will.  He likes that he can’t predict what he’ll say, can’t predict the way he’ll veer when he’s presented with a challenge.  He likes the way Will talks, too, the wry, twisting ways he describes himself.  It’s awkwardly lyrical, the unintentional poetry of the blue-collar man—although Will’s degrees and paycheck technically disqualify him from that category these days, he is still undeniably primitive in a way that Hannibal cannot quite understand.  

 

Hannibal likes more, though, to hear his own work through that poetic bent as Will’s sweet animal mind—because Will is educated, granted, eloquent when he really puts in the effort, but he operates still in terms of _survival,_ not _pursuit_ —struggled with interpreting the letters Hannibal has left for him in the killing fields.

 

He doesn’t get them all, of course, because he isn’t like Hannibal yet, but he comes closer than anyone else ever has and that is _thrilling_.

 

[And speaking of, speaking of, he’s coming now with a choked, raw sound, spilling onto his own stomach and Hannibal does not pause as he twists his face away, shamed.  Hannibal only continues to fuck up into him, bracing a grip on his hips that will swell and redden and bloom over the pale skin and because Hannibal does not pause, neither does Will, and he cries out like an aria, low and wretched and beautiful, when Hannibal fists a hand in his hair and jerks his head back and whispers _everything is alright, darling, good boy, don’t you dare stop moving, don’t you dare._ ]

 

Will reads Hannibal, somehow, and _that_ is what intrigues him.  Will understands the Ripper, and Hannibal has been the Ripper for far longer than he’s been Doctor Lecter—there’s a delightful intimacy in it, although Will hardly understands the implications of what he’s saying half the time.  He’s promised Hannibal all sorts of things while half out of his mind and more than once, Hannibal has snarled _mine_ into his skin and Will, hard and pushed up against him as though he wants to crawl into Hannibal’s skin has sobbed out agreement every single time.

 

There is no part of Hannibal, however, that enjoys the blank way Will always looks at him after, faded, like a photograph too long in the sun.

 

Hannibal is not a romantic, Hannibal is not _anything_ , truly, except intrigued by the impossibility of Will Graham, but he doesn’t imagine anyone would enjoy that.

 

Hannibal cannot see what Will is seeing when he scrunches his eyes shut, of course, and he has enough tact not to ask.  He does not know whose hands Will is imagining bracketing the tenses curve of his hips.  But he is a very good doctor, after all, and the way Will bites his lower lip bloody is a good indication.

 

That, Will’s frantic, choking need for—what? punishment? exorcism? Hannibal cannot be sure if he’s the whipping post or the altar, but he seems to be a critical element of Will’s ritual.  It must be more than his clear paternal fixation—why not Jack, in that case?  Jack, whose occasionally coarse methods must surely be closer to Will’s actual father than Hannibal’s own quiet calm.  But it is Hannibal he returns to, time and time again, always smelling faintly of whiskey and cigarettes, as though he has visited a bar in an needless effort to steel himself.  It is important, somehow, that _Hannibal_ be the rocky shores on which Will insists on running himself aground, and though Hannibal does not understand it, he never turns Will away.

 

Which is…curious.

 

[He had asked only once, the session after the very first time, and Will’s eyes had gone dark and flat, his lip curled to expose the barest hint of teeth.  “Does it matter?” he’d snarled.  “I’m getting what I want, you’re getting what you want, I let you keep _eating people_ and everyone’s happy.”  His gaze dropped, then, to rest somewhere around his kneecaps, his expression positively murderous.

 

Hannibal waited several moments but Will did not continue, only clenched and unclenched his hands where they curled, white-knuckled in his lap. Hannibal was mildly disappointed when a moment later Will slid smoothly to his knees and shifted between Hannibal’s legs, cocking a weird, bitter smile up at him.  “Don’t you like it?” he’d asked softly.  Jarring, like a switch had been flipped in a blacked-out room, and Hannibal found himself tensing, just the slightest bit, as Will reached for him.

 

Will, Hannibal realized faintly, had no trouble at all maintaining eye contact when he was on his knees.]

 

It is the only reason he treats Will as he does.  He knows, of course, how it would appear to any observer, casual or otherwise.  He has even begun to feel vaguely uneasy about accepting a paycheck for these sessions, which are too often spent in bed to really deserve the name.  He knows how the entire affair would appear, especially considering Will’s condition, and he knows it would be the professional ruin of him if Jack Crawford were to ever so much as suspect.  Will would, once again, be unwillingly cast as the victim and himself as the monster, preying on a man too damaged to properly defend himself—and for something so _base_.

 

That is the part he loathes.  The idea that this, this grunting, pushing, desperate thing Will falls into when he’s splitting himself open on Hannibal’s cock is what he wants from Will Graham is an insult to them both.

 

Honestly.  As though the things he wants to do to Will Graham have anything to do with _rutting_.

 

The scandal, he supposes, would be better than the damage a spurned Will might be able to do with his revelations about Hannibal, however fevered they may be.  And so Hannibal assumes the necessary risk of his role, accepts the distasteful mantle of the medical predator, the weary cliche he’s seen dragged across newspaper headlines countless times, because however unsavory it may be, it is far safer than what he actually _is_.

 

[“An artist,” Will moans into his throat, his breath hot and stilted as Hannibal stokes him slowly, a lazy arc between the crush of their bodies. 

 

Will sobs and bucks into the touch, shuddering and awkwardly braced on his side, unable to really balance himself without the help of his arms, which are currently bound behind his back.  With the proper rope, of course, because it was safer that way and he has no true wish to damage Will, and also because Hannibal was hardly going to ruin a perfectly good tie for the sake of indulging Will, no matter how sweetly he pleaded that _it doesn’t mark ‘em right, Hannibal, the rope doesn’t hurt_.]

 

If it doesn't hurt, it certainly bruises.  Even with as carefully as Hannibal ties him, there’s been a constant ring of mottled purples and yellows ringing both wrists for months.  Hannibal hates it, the unnecessary lines his nails leave across Will’s pale skin because Will is a canvas and there is no _need_ to ruin the clean simplicity of him like that, no need to mark him like an unruly dog.  Will wears his sickness on his skin as it in, in the way he shudders away and bristles and curls stubbornly down into himself, but coupled with the bruises, well.  

 

It explains the lack of eye contact in a way that rankles at Hannibal, because yes—Will is a victim, granted, but he did not break _that_ way.  He did not become a scared, mousy thing, jumping at his own shadow.  He headed, instead, straight into the proverbial mouth of the beast, devoted his life to wandering around in the minds of monsters, savage men like the very one that crafted him.

 

Hannibal especially does not like to mark him because once, he had come across what was clearly the tail end of a heated conversation, with Beverly gripping Will’s wrists and Will trying his futile best to twist away, sleeves shoved up his his elbows and a clear note of terror in his voice as he says “—nothing, Bev, really, I’m okay, it’s—“

 

“These are _ligature marks_ Will, they’re not—you’re not—who _did_ this to you?”  Hannibal had seen the stricken expression on Will’s face at the way she’d looked at him, and Hannibal cannot see her with her back turned, but he knows how deeply Will hates to be pitied and so it is an easy leap to make.  Will’s eyes snap up to Hannibal’s over Beverly’s shoulder and he flushes an abrupt, panicked shade of red as though he had not expected to be observed like this, caught out in front of someone he may have almost considered a friend.  Hannibal does not move, does not allow himself the luxury of a reaction, and it is then that Beverly asks, “Will, did someone hurt you…?” 

 

Hannibal could have told her that it was the worst possible thing she could have asked.  Nothing shut Will down quite like kindness, nothing seemed to short-circuit him quite like a gentle question.  But Beverly has never asked and Hannibal has never volunteered, and Will simply makes this low, wounded noise as he finally succeeded in freeing himself.

 

Like a fox that had just managed to chew off its own trapped paw, Will was gone immediately, vanished through the lab door with a stuttered, “I can’t—Bev, I’m sorry—“  He didn’t bother to finish the aborted sentence, just let the door fall shut behind him.

 

She didn’t stop him.  Hannibal suspected she knew better than to even try, suspected this was perhaps not the first confrontation she’d had with him over a cooling body.  The way she jerked an exasperated hand through her hair seemed a familiar twitch to her, as though she’d often repeated the gesture.  And, considering she had known Will far longer than Hannibal had been his confidante, Hannibal imagined she had.

 

She spun on her heel then, and her sharp gaze locked onto him.  “What are you waiting for?” she snapped.  “Go.  Go make sure he doesn’t do something stupid.  Isn’t that the whole reason you’re here?”

 

Hannibal was (is) more careful with the bindings, after, but he cannot control how Will pulls at them, frantic and terrified as he tries to shy away from Hannibal’s hands smoothing down his flanks to pry his legs apart.  

 

[Hannibal had paused the first time, unsure if Will was really trying to escape, if his labored breaths and quickened heartbeat were genuine, because Hannibal is not a kind man, granted, but _that_ is simply not his kind of savagery. Will had kicked him in the hip, though, kicked him hard and snarled _oh you motherfucker, you sonuvabitch, don’t you stop now._ So Hannibal hadn’t, and Will had cried after, but when Hannibal asked if perhaps they might consider a stop word, Will had laughed and laughed.  

 

It had not been a pleasant laugh, and now Will has taken to wearing long sleeves on a permanent basis. Predictably, no one has noticed.

 

Will husks out a soft noise and rocks into Hannibal’s touch.  “An artist,” he repeats, and he tilts his head back, bares his throat.  Hannibal takes the invitation and bites down obligingly, feels the rumble as Will grinds out, “You painted them for—for me, didn’t you, and they were beautiful, they were—“

 

Hannibal smiles with his teeth sunk sharp into Will’s jugular and Will keens low, mournful.  He cries Hannibal’s name like it’s the closest thing to worship that he has—and it might very well be.

 

That.

 

It’s about _that_.]

 

It has been happening—off and on, for there are weeks Will doesn’t come by for anything more than conversation and a glass of wine—for five months when Hannibal finds out.

 

Will never intended to tell him.  That much is clear from his dilated pupils, blown out and panicked, fixing desperately on Hannibal, pleading.  As though Hannibal might ignore it.  As though he _could_.  

 

But there is a mark, livid and swollen, a violent blossom of the shape of a mouth that _is not his_ along the ridge of Will’s left hip.  Hannibal, both hands still fisted in the skin-warm fabric of Will’s button-down simply stares.  He does not say a thing.  He finds, for the first time since he can remember, he does not have anything to say.

 

Will has been gone three weeks.  A case, he’d told Hannibal over dinner, so he wouldn’t be by for appointments any time soon and Hannibal had not asked because it was hardly unusual for Will to be shipped off to another state with no warning—serial killers were, largely, not a predictable lot.  And so Hannibal had crossed out his sessions with barely a second thought.  He only realized, after three nights spent tossing and turning—so unlike him, Hannibal had learned young not to cry out in his sleep, not to draw unnecessary attention if he could avoid it—that he was missing Will’s ragged, uneven breathing.  Hannibal cannot honestly remember _missing_ anything before.  It was disconcerting, honestly, and so he killed a middle-aged gas station attendant and busied himself revisiting a few much-loved French recipes, because nothing grounded him quite like the sanctity of his work.

 

But Will has been gone three weeks, and the mark is a day or two old at the most.

 

“You were not on a case.”  His voice is even.  Toneless.  It surprises him, as the arctic fury buried in the pit of his belly hardly matches the bland way the words slide past his tongue.  It is not what he expects to say.  It is not what Will expects to hear—he shifts in his seat, suddenly wary.  He eyes Hannibal as though he has only just remembered who— _what_ —he’s speaking to and he should.  He _should_ be frightened.  

 

Hannibal is a killer, and Will Graham is _his_.

 

“No,” is all Will says, though, makes no move to protest or defend himself, though he eyes Hannibal, cagey, like he isn’t quite sure what to do next.  As though Hannibal might lash out, as though Hannibal would be that petulant.  Hannibal staunchly ignores the minute part of him that wants to wrap a hand around Will’s pale throat and pin him to the back of the couch and _crush_ until Will goes slack and pliant below him, until Will remembers who, exactly, he’s been sharing a bed with.

 

Hannibal wants to fuck him.  Hannibal wants to open up his skin and drain him until he can’t see that hateful purple mark for the wet slick of blood, wants to bury his hands wrist-deep in the cracked-open expanse of Will’s chest cavity and clench his powerful fingers around Will’s heart, wants to coax its arrhythmic patter into something strong and steady and _his_.

 

_Who was it_ , he wants to ask, but it really doesn’t matter who it was—a name does him no good. That isn’t the point.  “Where were you?” he asks instead.

 

Will is chewing on his lower lip, a hateful old habit and he says, tentative, “Louisiana,” like he’s choking on the word.  Like he can’t breathe.  He’s shaking with these fine tremors, as though every muscle in his body is pulled whipcord-taut, a frightened deer ready to bolt at the first available opportunity.  It’s all Hannibal needs, really, but the way Will’s gaze fixes determinedly on a point six feet to the left of Hannibal neatly confirms Hannibal’s suspicions. 

 

After all, Will never said his father was dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ughhhh what am I doing with my life


	3. just clean my head up, doc--I'll give you anything you want.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> uh...no porn here, weirdly
> 
> much porn next chapter tho
> 
>  
> 
> angstangstangst

 

 

If you asked.  If you asked him, held him point-blank with a gun in his face, scared him bad enough to startle truth out of him, Will could tell you exactly when it is this… _thing_ started.  Down to the minute.  Down to the way Hannibal’s office reminded him of museums he’d visited as a boy, the man himself nearly too literary to be real.  Like the bad guy in a Victorian novel, painfully polite and interestingly exotic, except that man had looked at Will and _known_.

 

“You do not merely see these men,” Hannibal said, and he tilted his head, just so, the dusky firelight catching indeterminate on the shades of grey and gold in his hair.  Will’s breath hitched in the back of his throat.  “You _are_ these men.”

 

And that.  That was it, wasn’t it, the very worst of Will laid out and stretched tenuous between them.  Will didn’t move.  Didn’t breathe, felt like, because he’s never been able to explain it right before and he’s carried this wicked thing with him his whole life.  How could, how could Hannibal possibly have known, he had the time to think before he was stumbling to Hannibal’s pristine guest bathroom and dropping to his knees on the granite tile.

 

He never said it.  Never said.  Wouldn’t dare, couldn’t risk someone knowing the way he howls inside, sometimes, standing poised over a desiccated corpse, teeth bared in an animal parody of a smile like it’s his victory, _his kill._ He could feel it in his veins, feel the heavy thrum of his pulse in all his extremities and along the line of his dick, gone achingly and embarrassingly hard in his jeans.  He could taste blood in his teeth—though he only really knows the metallic tang of his own—and all down his throat, warm and thick and cloying at his tongue.

 

It happened more than it should, but Will has never told anyone because he _knows better_ and yet.

 

Hannibal knew.

 

“I get lost sometimes,” he admitted shakily, braced on the pristine rim of the toilet.  His hands looked comically rough against the mirror-white, too tanned and dirty, and it threw his own voice back at him, bayou-warm.   “Stuck.  Like, I can’t—I don’t know what’s me and what’s them.”  _I like it_ , he didn’t say, because even the most understanding therapist in the world must have had limits, right, and he had nothing left in his stomach to throw up.

 

Hannibal had said nothing more at the time, merely rubbed a comforting hand between Will’s shoulder blades—too sharp under his jacket, but Hannibal had not commented, and his hand strayed no lower—and helped Will to his feet.

 

Will wonders now if Hannibal wanted him even then.  Wonders if he’d thrilled at that first awful foray in to the labyrinth of Will’s mind.  Wonders if he’d have taken him right there, bile still sour on his tongue, shaking and panting on the bathroom floor, if Will had offered.

 

He wishes he’d offered.  Wishes he’d taken Hannibal’s cock in his mouth right then, started this whole thing off right, because maybe if he’d been giving something back to Hannibal right from the start, he wouldn’t feel so achingly guilty now, as Hannibal’s warm fingers work at the bruise over his hip, pressing in like he’s trying to make sure it’s real.

 

 

*

 

 

 

Will couldn’t begin to tell you, honestly, what he was thinking.

 

He hadn’t—it had been running, okay, technically, it had been irresponsible and cowardly and really everything an adult man should be ashamed of.  Hadn’t bothered even to call out, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t getting Jack’s increasingly-frantic voicemails.  He was.  Listened to ‘em, even, over and over until he had them memorized, but he couldn’t pick up the phone when the man called.  He tried, he did, reached for out every time with _I just needed a few days to myself, I’m fine_ and _death in the family, yeah, great-aunt, I’m sorry I didn’t call but it was so last-minute_ on his tongue.  Jack wouldn’t buy it.  He’d try anyways.

 

He just stares at it, blank, let it keep ringringringing because he knows the first words out of Jack’s mouth will be _what the fuck do you think you’re doing, Will_ and that’s the thing, isn’t it.  He doesn’t know.

 

So he doesn’t answer.

 

He pays the neighbor kid—skinny, knock-kneed thing at twelve but his awful, predatory mind can see ten years from now when she’s sleek and lovely and _keep her inside_ he wants to tell her parents, _keep her safe, there’s so much out here to break her—_ twice what it’s worth to feed the dogs for a month.  She grins at him when he does, wide, rictus grin still missing two baby teeth and thanks him, but Will has been inside the heads of men who would happily rip those teeth from her smiling mouth with pliers before fucking it tip she passes out from blood loss, so he doesn’t smile back.  He hopes it’s enough time.  Hopes it’s _enough_.

 

It takes him less than a week to track down his old man, barely ten miles from where Will had left him last.  It’s a cabin now, not a maze of doublewides, which must mean Momma’s dead.  She always insisted on the road being beneath her feet, and though Will can’t remember a time they’d ever really left his sleepy hometown, he thinks the option was enough to settle her restlessness.

 

She used to call him her gypsy when she was sober, through she said it kindly— _rangy_ , she said, _boys like you weren’t born to sit still, darling,_ and Will is dimly surprised to realize he feels nothing except a quiet relief that at least she’s probably peaceful now.  Sleeping dreamless, the way she’d always wanted.  Better than any pill.  

 

The cabin’s nice enough, small enough to be quaint, with shutters and windowpanes painted what must have once been a cheery blue.  It’s obvious the owner of the house has no interest in keeping up appearances, though—the paint is peeling in brittle curls, the choked out with heavy ropes of kudzu that catch at Will’s boots as he crosses to the house.  There’s a wide swath of shingles missing from the roof and a stray cat asleep on the porch.  The cat’s missing half an ear, and it doesn’t look like it’s belonged to anyone its whole life.

 

Will had forgotten just how thick the air was in Louisiana.  That must be why he’s choking.

 

A dog comes shambling amicably towards him as he creaks the gate open. It’s a purebred something, some kind of hunting dog,  its coat a lovely gloss of auburn, but its paws are dirty, burrs tangled thick into its fur.  It dances at his feet, regardless, and it looks well-fed, though the tail it thumps against Will’s legs has been broken more than once and healed wrong.

 

The dog is wearing Will’s collar.

 

Oh, there’s a shiny new brass tag on it, one that reads something other than Will’s own name, but he’d know it anywhere.  It’s still a dull red, dingy, the tab near the buckle worked smooth from Will’s fingers constantly worrying at it.  It’s a soft thing, supple as Will’s own skin and he bets it stinks of dog now.  Bets it would chafe his throat.

 

_That’s mine,_ Will wants to snarl regardless.  _That’s mine, he gave it, you can’t have it,_ but Will is thirty-eight and a man grown, so he just scratches the dog behinds its ears.  It leans into the touch gratefully, tongue lolling.  No sense in blaming the dog, anyways—poor thing wasn’t even alive when he left home the last time, and he’s willing to bet it wasn’t the first puppy to grow into that collar.  Willing to bet it won’t be the last, either.

 

“Willy?”

 

Everything, every-fucking-thing in Will draws taut at that, bowstring-tensed, snapped tight and aching.  He sounds—God, he sounds just the same, easy honeyed drawl, warm and a little surprised, but Will’s fingers freeze in the dog’s fur anyways and he’s paralyzed, like Daddy’s slipped him something, breath suddenly hot wet and sticky in his throat.  He can’t look up.  

 

He can’t anything.  He can’t, he _can’t_ , and the dog is so good, such a good dog, because it whines at him and snuffles into the palms of Will’s rigid hands as he shakes.  But of course it is, of course it’s a good dog, because Will was a good boy, too, and Daddy knows how to train ‘em right, knows how to keep ‘em belly-down and crawling and Will never had a chance to be anything but prey, did he. Not really. 

 

One of his hands is gripping too tight in the collar.  The dog whines, its eyes frantically searching Will’s face for some indication that he might be about to let go.  It must not find anything, though, so it pins its ears back and its tail between its legs and Will holds—doesn’t pull tighter.

 

He doesn’t want to hurt it.  Just wants to know he _could_.  “This is mine,” is all he says.

 

“Willy,” Samuel Graham says and there’s real _something_ there, something heartbroken and gentle and so foreign that it sticks, porcupine quills in the back of Will’s throat.  He feels heavy and slick, warm with gin, so he can’t tell if he’s smelling liquor rolling off his own skin or Samuel’s, but if his father’s drunk, too, what does it matter?  Might be better.  

 

Would be better.

 

“It’s Will.  Just Will.”

 

“Will,” he repeats dutifully.  “Will, I am—it’s been so long, son, you look—you look—“  He stope there, like he knows what he’s supposed to say.  _You look well son, how’s it going, you got a special lady up there at the school_ but Will’s father will never ask any of that, and he’s never been good at lying to Will. Not when it came to anything important.

 

Will laughs.  “I look like shit.”

 

“Yeah.”  Samuel doesn’t look much better.  He’s grey, drawn, tired in a way Will doesn’t remember, and had he always been so frail?  The Samuel that’s always been hanging half over Will’s shoulder was a big man, broad-chested and thundering angry and surely it wasn’t all Will’s poor memory.  Surely his father has withered over the years, surely this ghost can’t be the thing he’d lived in stark terror of all his life.

 

“I haven’t been sleeping well.”  Will scratches the dog’s ears again then pauses, considering.  “For the past, what….twenty-eight years?”

 

His father’s shoulders sag.  Maybe he was wrong, Will thinks, except when Samuel reaches for his son, his lungs rattle like autumn leaves and _oh_ , Will realizes, _you’re already dead._

 

It must have been Momma’s cigarettes that got him, Will thought.  He never smoked himself, hated even to be around it, although Will had snuck a few out of her purse on more than one occasion.  Still, Will wishes abruptly that she’d lived to see this—wants for her to know she’s the thing that killed him, after all, drove the man who’d ruined her straight into his grave a good twenty years before he even had any business planning the funeral.  

 

She’d have laughed.  Will’s sure of it.

 

Will shies away when Samuel reaches for him now and his old man’s face crumples, sorrow dragging deep, unfamiliar grooves across his skin.  “Son,” he tries, and coughs, dusky.  Old bones in a tin cup.  Will’s heartbeat thuds wet in his ears.  “Son, I’m so sorry.”

 

Will blinks at that, and his eyes flick up before he can think about it. They meet his father’s, meet the deep, molasses brown, warm and wary like a coyote’s.  Feral, like Will’s.

 

Monster, like Will.

 

Dry, though.  His father’s eyes are dry, and not glossy, though they’re red, like he might cry.  So the stink of whiskey, then, it could just be him or it could be totally in Will’s mind, which is…odd.  “Are you sober?”

 

His old man has the good grace to look vaguely ashamed of himself.  He nods, though, dazed, like he’s seeing a ghost, which might not actually be far off base.  “Yeah,” he says.  “Yeah, since—since about five years after you left, maybe.  I tried to call, but I couldn’t—I didn’t have your number and I didn’t know where you were and—“  He scrubs a massive hand over his eyes and makes a strange sound, halfway between a laugh and a sob.  “Son, I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am.”

 

Five years after Will left.  That'd be…after Josh, okay, but that still leaves fifteen years.  Fifteen years, then, of Will trying to—trying be the operative word—exorcise himself best he could.  Fifteen years of his awful, raw, pit-of-the-stomach first love being his own fucking _father_ and he couldn’t even bring himself to say it so who could he have told, who could he have _had_ that could possibly look at him the same after?

 

Fifteen years Will had fucked himself out on whatever he could with whoever would have him and he’s supposed to what, just forgive and forget because he hadn’t left a _phone number?_

 

“Fine,” Will spits.  He wrestles the mostly-full bottle of Maker’s Mark out of his coat pocket and shoves it at his father, presses it firmly into his hands as he passes on the way into the cabin.  “I’ve got a head start, then.  Get caught up.”

 

The interior of the cabin is depressing.  Dark, with all the shades drawn like his dad’s a goddamn vampire, and dusty.  Sparsely lit, barely decorated, and Will assumed the furniture came with the place—he can’t imagine his father picking out reading lamps in IKEA.  The only things that really look like _his_ are the rifles neatly racked along the back wall of the tiny living room, polished and oiled and gleaming dully in the firelight.  But for the cheap decor, it’s exactly like Will’s house back in Wolf Trap—right down to the couch reeking faintly of dog, and the precarious stack of barely-rinsed dishes in the kitchen sink.  Will manages to find two clean cups, though, old plastic Slurpee ones, emblazoned with some wrestler Will can’t name and the titular character from _Harry Potter_.  He slams them down on the countertop.

 

He can barely see.  There’re black spots, bleak points of rage swimming across his field of vision, and he’s going to start hyperventilating soon.  The cabin’s too small, his father too close, and even the friendly brush of the dog’s tail across his legs makes him want to peel off his own skin.  He’s burning up.  He’s _boiling_ and he wishes he could take off his jacket but the idea of shedding anything in front of this man makes his stomach twist in on itself.

 

He needs a fucking drink.  “Pour,” he grinds out between gritted teeth at his father, who is watching him warily from the hallway, cradling the bottle in his hands like it’s a loaded gun.    

 

He’s maybe looking at Will a little bit like that, too, and right—right, Samuel wasn’t there for the diagnosis, wasn’t there for the endless parade of medications and doctors and that one time he’d balanced for six hours straight on the frigid edge of a bridge and never managed to make himself fall.  He hadn’t been there for the first hospitalization—Mark, senior-year roommate, sweet kid, drove him to the emergency room after he found him hanging from the showerhead in their shared bathroom, made appropriately sympathetic noises and let Will suck him off as a _thank you_ after the institution let him loose—or the second.  “Pour me a fucking _drink_ , are you _deaf,_ ” Will snaps and his father frowns.

 

“Son,” he tries and that’s it.  

 

“No,” Will snarls and he’s not a lot taller than Samuel now, but his father positively shrinks away when Will storms towards him.  Cringes when Will grabs hold of his forearm and wrenches at it and that, that isn’t right.  That isn’t the way it’s supposed to go, that isn’t the Samuel Will wants, hell, it isn’t even a Samuel he _recognizes._ So he shoves himself right up into his father’s face, pushes until there’s that blessed spark, that familiar glint of fury that means Will better watch himself _, I mean it, boy, you be careful now, don’t you make me—_

 

 

But Will made him.  Every fucking time, he made him, and he can make him now.

 

“No,” Will says again, and they’re close enough to kiss, but they don’t.  Never have.  Never will, more than likely, only Will wants to bite at his father’s mouth ’til his teeth are slick with it. “You don’t get to—you can’t _demote_ me like that, like I did something wrong, please, Dad, that’s not—that’s not _fair_ , I did everything you wanted, I can, I can—“ and he’s sliding forwards, into the fragile cradle of his father’s chest, but he’s too tall now.  The length of him is unfamiliar and he knocks against Samuel in all the wrong places. And Will can’t change that, can’t change a thing about this except he noses At Samuel’s throat, pressing mouth to skin like he’s trying to bleed something out.

 

_suck out the poison_ , Will thinks blankly, and then Samuel is twisting away from him and Will’s grasping, certain he’s done something wrong again, except his father is only reaching for the cups to pour him a drink.  With his son’s hands braced on his stomach, Samuel’s falls neatly off the wagon.

 

Fifteen years, Will doesn’t say, and watches his father pull out the cork expertly with his teeth.  Fifteen years, and he sloshes a generous amount of whiskey into each cup like the last drink he poured was this morning.  He doesn’t even pause to consider before he hands Will the Harry Potter cup and keeps the wrestler for himself, an unconsciously paternal gesture that makes Will’s skin fucking _crawl_.

 

He tosses the liquor back with practiced ease.  Pours another.  Another.  His father matches him, shot for shot, but Will showed up with a belly full of it already and he wasn’t joking about the head start.  _Did you keep any of Momma’s pills_ , he wants to ask and he wants to know that more than he wants to know how she died, because he’s hard already, swollen thick and heavy where he’s pressed up against his zipper.  

 

It’s not something he wants to feel.  His father’s smile has too many teeth, sharp-white, like a shark’s in the deep gloom of the ocean.

 

The important thing to remember here is that _Will has no idea what he’s doing._

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

The night Hannibal finds out, they don’t fuck.

 

Instead, Will shakes apart, alone in Hannibal’s lush, unfamiliar guest bedroom.  He lies stiff in the bed, fingers pressed sharp into that damn mark, biting deep enough into the meat of his hand to draw blood because if he can just stay silent, if he can just _be good_ he can—

 

He can’t though.  He wakes up alone, too, blood dried dark and tacky between his teeth, drenched in a cold, stinking sweat.  

 

Hannibal does not tell him it’s a punishment.

 

He hardly needs to.

 

 

*

 

 

Initially, when they don’t talk about it, Will is relieved.  It’s not like—they didn’t exchange rings, okay, and it’s not like Hannibal’s really even his therapist.  He doesn’t owe him an explanation. Doesn’t owe him anything, in fact, and he figures Hannibal’s a grown man.  If he wants to talk about it, if it bothers him, he’ll say something.  But he doesn’t, never says a damn word, just watches him for a few long minutes, eyes hooded and flat as marble.  He had just dropped Will’s shift back into place, gone so far as to refasten the buttons, and he did not press for an explanation, so Will didn’t volunteer one. 

 

He isn’t sure, honestly, if he wants to know Hannibal’s perspective on the entire affair.  And Hannibal, well-bred as ever, does not demand anything Will does not offer.  He simply stops pouring Will a glass of wine ten minutes before their sessions are up.  Stops setting the table for two, unless he’s expecting other company.  Instead, he meets Will at the door at the end of every session to help him into his coat and wave him off with a “do be careful on the road, won’t you,” that sounds so fucking genuine it makes Will’s teeth ache.

 

Will can’t bring himself to take the bed.  He leaves it to the dogs, instead, who happily burrow into the comforters and pillows.  Winston stays at his feet, though, ever-loyal, curled into the couch cushions, eyes half-closed as Will methodically drinks himself to sleep to the accompaniment of bad infomercials.

 

He jerks off in the bed, once.  Thinks about Hannibal’s broad hands and the way his mouth tilts when he smiles and how he was the first person Will had ever fucked in this bed, how gently he took Will apart piece by piece and knit him back together and—

 

When he comes, the back of his throat burns like he’s just taken a shot, and so the bedroom becomes the dog’s territory.

 

Sometimes, Hannibal sends him home from their sessions with a feast packed neatly into glass containers, but whenever Will tries to take a bite, all he can think about is Abigail’s skin splitting open and so the food sits, untouched, until the smell forces Will to throw it out.  

 

Sometimes, he’ll feed the meat to the dogs and as their thick, affectional tongues bathe his hands, he doesn’t feel hungry at all.  Will’s belly grows hollower.  He does, too.

 

He feels light.  Clean.  He barely needs sleep, anymore, though his hands shake too badly to hold a razor.  He relinquishes himself to the shaggy, prematurely salt-and-pepper beard his father’s sported long as he can remember.  And if he has more grey now than his father did at his age, well, it might be because he knows exactly how that beard feels, rasping over the hollow of his hip.

 

His students stop smiling when they pass him in the halls.  Beverly keeps giving him these looks, pinched and concerned, and she keeps leaving all these pastel-coloured pamphlets on his desk, the kind with hotlines in bold on the back and pictures of the truly boring shit only the supremely fucked-up ever daydream about—picnics and feeding ducks and a lot of happy-looking white people playing with a beautiful golden retriever.

 

Will shreds some of them.  Tears some of them up.  Makes sure Beverly sees, because what does it matter?  He’s functional.  He’s doing his job, he’s on fire, he’s working twenty-hour days for two weeks at a time and _he is fine._

 

Still, he finds himself, willing moth to flame, seated in Hannibal’s offices twice a week like clockwork.  He’s never so much as five minutes late, but he couldn’t tell you what they talk about.  Nothing personal, he’s pretty sure, nothing real, probably just work and the latest monster of the week.

 

_I want to suck you off_ is all Will remembers thinking, on repeat, stuck on a loop tracked through his skull, but instead, he says, “Yeah, I guess the nightmares are getting better.”

 

They aren’t.  They really, really aren’t, because it’s not just the ever-present stag now, oh no, of course not.  Now, Will dreams near every night of the stag mounting him, ruthless and suffocating him in its thick, ropy fur as Will cries out, his mouth and nose full of the animal’s musk.  He dreams of stretching and splitting and tearing open as the stag crushes Will’s throat with its blunt teeth and Will pleads with the animal in a language it cannot understand _please, c’mon, please._

 

He has a hard time looking at that statue near Hannibal’s office door.

 

Of course he doesn’t tell Hannibal any of this, doesn’t tell him he wakes up hard, most nights, hard and shivering and that plea still dying in his mouth, festering on his tongue.

 

He also doesn’t tell Hannibal that his father’s taken to calling all hours of the night, liquor smooth—because when they fell, his kind, they fell _hard_ —pleading with Will, breathing heavy into the receiver.  Will doesn’t tell Hannibal that he’s tried to get off to it, desperate, tried to get off to the brittle way his father said his name and _come home, boy, please give me one more chance to make this right, I miss you…_

 

He can’t, of course.  Not before his father passes out or loses interest in pleading with dead air, and if Will drinks himself sick after, well.  Hannibal doesn’t need to know that either.

 

He tells Hannibal nothing.  Hannibal does not ask.

 

That is, until the day he abruptly _does_.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. and all that followed fell (like mercury to hell)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I lied about the sex
> 
> oops

 

Initially, Hannibal is angry.

 

Angrier than he can remember being in a long while, since soldiers and blood slashed bright against snow and the way his skinny teenaged frame knocked against itself as he shivered, little more than a skeleton held together with gritted teeth, an aching jaw and a furious roaring in the hollow pit of his stomach.

 

After Lithuania, nothing ever stung quite as brightly--and how could it? He hadn't even had time, really, to understand where his parents had gone, both taken in the cruelly brief span of a breath and then _flames licking at his skin, nothing in his ears but a high, reedy ringing but he must be screaming, he must, his throat's raw with sobs and thick smoke and his mouth tastes dully like old coins and then--_

 

And then. 

 

Silence followed the fire. Hannibal didn't speak to the soldiers.  Hannibal didn't speak to anyone. Wouldn't say a word about where they were or who he was of why it was so fiercely, desperately important that the little wisp of a girl who clutched Hannibal's hand like she was drowning ate her fill before he would allow himself a bite. 

 

If the soldiers had cared to listen, they'd have heard him whispering to her long after the sun had sunk low and took any hope of warmth with it. They'd have heard his butchered renderings of old folk tales, fractured into unrecognizable horror stories by Hannibal's own nightmares, and they'd have seen the way the little girl dropped obediently to sleep despite the stories, soothed, maybe, by the knowledge that she still had one protector left.

 

They did not care, though, until the food ran out. They paid the children no mind until there was no more meat to be had and then, the very last concern on anyone's mind was weather Hannibal's tongue worked properly or not.

 

[years later when he came back for them in a sleek, muscled body, well-fed on the meat of the men he'd already killed, he will prove that it does. He will speak to them for the first time as he slowly takes them apart, joint by joint, limb by limb, his arms crimson to the elbow, teeth bared in a wide smile. He will tell them those same stories he told her and he will laugh as they watch, blank, chemically silenced, as he deconstructs them into nothing more than a disjointed assembly, a pile of parts and organ and meat--nothing human after all.

 

But he knew that already.]

 

Hannibal understands, from an objective viewpoint _why_ he is the way that he is--it is an unfortunate side-effect of the occupation that he has become wearily over-acquainted with his own thought processes.  What better case study could he ask for? And, after all, wasn't there the old adage that the self-aware madman cannot truly be mad?

 

[He is not mad. He is not.]

 

He knows that was the moment his hunger was born, there, knelt in the snow with his stomach achingly empty but his mouth full and he'd bite the man if he could, bit him off at the root, but Mischa's been crying for days, she's so hungry and he'd been promised bread and--

 

He remembers too, distantly, a time before when a beautiful blonde woman had held him gently on her lap and fed him bites of delicate cakes that melted soft and sweet on his tongue as he had snuggled into the broad cradle of her arms, the plush of her breasts at his back. He remembers being warm and sleepy and safe, but he remembers it like a well-loved book he'd read too many times as a child. It does not touch him. He does not know what safe is supposed to feel like, and the slumbering creature inside him--the ripper, the hunter, the only honesty he has ever had--does not know what it is to feel _sated._

 

This, he supposes, is not really worth mourning.  He never did, anyways, not until, well.

 

Not until Will Graham.

 

*

 

Truthfully, when he met Will for the very first time, he forgot him not soon after.There was a lingering, vague impression of rumpled denim, a tangle of mousey hair and soft, wounded animal eyes that did not meet his as they were introduced.He was just another rookie agent, as far as Hannibal was told, and for a very long time, Hannibal didn’t think much of him.

 

As a rule, Hannibal didn't think much of _anybody._

 

So it was the usual ten-second diagnosis for Will, the same as everyone else Hannibal has met in the last two decades--hunched shoulders, chewed nails, skinny wrists, deep, sad hollows under downcast eyes--and it came all in a detached, textbook rush the way it always did. 

 

Classic introvert. Autism spectrum, for certain. Bullied, probably since early childhood—that would be the slump, shy children never really grew out of it--and a twitch to him that could only be frayed nerves or a drug habit, but FBI were tested regularly, so his mind must have been a _mess_.He chewed on the skin of his lower lip absently, until it smeared red across his front teeth, and when Jack said his name (Will Graham, a bland name for a blank man) there was a pronounced flinch.Badly treated by a male figure, then, could have been the father, and Will insisted on being addressed by his Christian name only, so the father knew, at least, and did nothing.

 

In retrospect, it was always there, the little bits that made him shine.But Hannibal wasn’t infallible.He missed it.Will is, he only realized much later, very good at being _missed_.And even now, Hannibal cannot blame Jack for keeping quiet about the questionably-stable agent he’d pinned most of his career on—and he would never have met Will Graham otherwise, he is sure, so he finds it easily within himself to forgive Jack his oversight.

 

They saw each other briefly in some capacity for the next year or so, mostly crossing paths those times that Hannibal would, at Bella’s insistence, retrieve Jack from his crime scenes and force the man to eat something more substantial than black coffee. Will’s particular talents put him in the field hunting those same grisly minds with Jack often enough that Hannibal was aware of him the same way he would be aware of a lamp in the sitting room he didn’t particularly like or hate, one that he rarely used because of its proximity to the hallway light.

 

Will was useful or he wasn’t, and Hannibal really only registered him when his hair was a particular length and his beard had started to grow in.And even then, he barely remembered Will by name.They met in the hallways, exchanged passing nods, and one time Will was the person to hand-deliver a report to Hannibal’s Baltimore office, direct from Jack Crawford’s desk, and that was the extent of it, for a very long time.

 

They were alone together only once in that year.It was during a particularly bloody affair, one ending with six bodies in the burned-out husk of an abandoned factory in the dead of January. Hannibal had known nothing of the case, of course, merely been on his way to retrieve Jack for a dinner he and Bella had planned the week prior, and found his office abandoned.A helpful clerk had provided directions to the scene and it had been clear the moment he pulled up that they would have to reschedule their plans.

 

“I should have called,” Jack said by way of greeting as Hannibal closed his car door.“We just got a tip in the last hour or so, and when we got here…well.”He waved vaguely at the mess behind him—Hannibal could only see a bluish lone arm just inside the doorway, but he could safely assume from the smell, the wet, sick-sweet meat reek of the place that the rest of the bodies had met a similar fate inside the warehouse.  

 

“Your work is hardly predictable,” Hannibal allowed.He wasn’t angry.Jack’s rude behavior hadn’t been deliberate, after all, and they had been friends more than long enough for Hannibal to allow Jack the benefit of the doubt. “Should we reschedule for another night?Bella may have left her office by now, but I doubt she’s gotten very far.”

 

“No.”Jack rubbed a weary hand over his eyes.“No, Bella’s been needing a night out all week.We’re close to wrapping up here, they shouldn’t need me much longer—can you wait maybe ten, fifteen minutes?”

 

He could, of course, but the crime scene stunk like an ill-kept slaughterhouse, so Hannibal had stepped up onto the building’s roof, seeking--what? Sunlight? Fresh air? Escape from the agents milling around the first floor, certainly, buzzing dull like flies on a dead rabbit. It turned his stomach to watch, the gaudy clash of latex gloves and evidence bags disabling all that careful work.He didn’t like to think about _this_ part of the process much, because he was all too aware that it happened to his own designs, all too aware that some ape with a laughable attempt at a medical degree would be tasked with taking his creations apart and fumbling at an interpretation, like an undergraduate student faced with Dostoyevsky for the trembling first time.

 

Hannibal contented himself with thinking of the photographs they must’ve taken beforehand.He liked the idea of that, of his work splashed garish and striking across the interoffice memos. He thought perhaps his work burned itself into the agents who found it in the first place, and then echoed over dozens of computer screens—and he liked that, too.Liked to think about the people he would likely never meet who couldn’t sleep easy at night knowing that somewhere he was loose. 

 

 

He was alone on the roof, save for one small, dark-haired figure at the ledge, huddled in a olive-green army jacket that hopefully served more function than it did form.The thing was positively drowning him, hanging well past his fingertips and halfway down his thighs, worn nearly through at the elbows.He curled himself tight around a lighter, clicking at it desperately, though the cutting wind didn't seem to want to cooperate.

 

“Come on, come on you sonuvabitch,” Will Graham swore softly. Hannibal could just see the hand-rolled cigarette clenched tight between his bared teeth, and his hands were shaking too badly to even hold the lighter properly, never mind using it.  

 

Agent Graham wasn’t a smoker, Hannibal thought absently, and wondered where— _why?_ \--he picked that up.Graham’s fingernails weren’t yellowed, his breath didn’t smell like nicotine, and it puzzled Hannibal for only a second.Then a cloying, musky scent reached Hannibal’s nose as the lighter finally caught and Will drew in a deep, shuddering breath, held, exhaled.

 

Marijuana.How disappointingly _pedestrian._

 

Hannibal cleared his throat.Graham nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound, whipped around, and it was only then that he seemed to catch himself.The blunt burned a steady, rank ribbon of smoke into the air as Graham blinked, owlish.His eyes were red but dry, his mouth bloodless, chapped. He looked terrified, pupils blown near-black even in the bright glare of the sun on snow, but as Hannibal met his gaze, Graham stuck the thing back in his mouth and took another long draw.

 

“Please,” he said and then stopped, frowned, as though he’d only just realized he had no defense.“I can’t...you don’t know what it’s like.”

 

That was fair.Hannibal couldn’t imagine how a crime scene might look through Graham’s eyes. He had heard snatches of rumors about the man by this point, realized that there was something truly off-putting about him.He could step into the minds of killers, Jack had explained once, a woefully abridged description of Will that did no justice to the twisted, lovely thing that would crawl so gratefully into his bed just six months from that point.  

 

And he did it, Jack emphasized, in the most unsettling way, seemed half out of his mind for weeks after, sometimes.Jack had known the man for years, by then, but he’d be damned if he knew whether the crime scened thrilled or terrified Will.He didn’t have it in him to ask.  

 

“I don’t want to know,” Jack had growled, staring deep into his third glass of chianti.“I don’t want to know and he doesn’t want to tell, so it works out perfectly.” 

 

And perhaps it did, in the sense that Jack was able to sleep at night, eternally ignorant of the furious way the young man snarled up into himself.Nothing about the way Graham seemed about to drop where he stood seemed to fit in Hannibal’s definition of _working_ , but Jack rarely asked for his opinion on these things back then.

 

[Absently, Hannibal wanted, even then, to crack open Will’s chest and look at his lungs.The meat would be ruined, most likely, blackened and tar-clogged. Useless.Worse than a waste.]

 

Graham stumbled towards him, loose-limbed and clumsy.His hands were shaking.He reached for Hannibal, only barely before he caught himself and pulled back, sharp, like a snapped fishing line.It would be endearing, maybe, on a younger man in a different context, but Hannibal had no patience for unprofessionalism like this.Graham looked well into his thirties, well into _knowing better._ There must have been something showing on Hannibal’s face, something distinctly unimpressed, because Graham made a noise like Hannibal had struck him, wounded, and grabbed at his arm.“Please, you can’t tell Jack. Please, Dr. Lecter.”

 

[Later, Hannibal will examine this moment over and over again in repetitive Technicolor, trying to determine what, exactly had happened.Where it had changed from a mild embarrassment for Graham, caught out in a habit he should have rightly outgrown into—

 

Well.Into something else.]

 

And he thinks maybe that was it, that moment right there when Will had first pleaded with him, first asked anything of him.First _depended_ on him, and though he couldn’t know then what that would mean later, he found himself very nearly smiling at the young agent.Caught himself in time, of course, and managed to keep his face cooly neutral, but it was worth noting that he wanted to at all, he couldn’t remember the last person he’d—

 

[mischa]

 

“Please,” Graham said again and he was far, far too close to Hannibal.Hannibal could smell lighter fluid and burnt leaves, the pitiful, acrid tang of fear, and though Hannibal tried to pull back, it only made Graham crowd closer.He was not much shorter than Hannibal, but he curled down like an animal, hunched and apologetic, deferring like he didn’t even have to think about it.Like it came to him naturally and Hannibal wondered if Graham even realized he was doing it.His head was bowed, eyes downcast, and through the unruly mat of his hair Hannibal could see the bared, pale skin of the back of his neck.He might as well roll onto his back and offer his throat like a dog, for all Hannibal expected this, because the Graham he had known up until now prickled and glared at even the faintest attempt at human contact.But.Graham was—Graham was _submitting._

 

[Crack his ribs and touch his lungs and pull them out, pull them out in great wet shreds because their owner certainly doesn’t seem to have any decent use for them and something electric skittered over Hannibal’s skin, sparking, catching.

 

It hurt.

 

Hannibal _wanted_ and it _hurt._ ]

 

Hannibal pressed his lips together.“I’m afraid you’ve mistaken my relationship with Jack Crawford.”

 

Graham blinked.Twisted his head to the side to look up at Hannibal and he was so pale Hannibal could see the rabbit pounding of the pulse blue in his throat.Hannibal wanted to wrap his hands around it, wanted to press at the ridge of Graham’s throat until he cried out.Wanted to taste it, maybe, except he wanted to taste it with that pulse still beating and breath still filling those lungs and that was new, wasn’t it, first time he’d wanted to, wanted to—

 

[—Take his eyes take his eyes—

 

— _Enough._ ]

 

“I do not report to him.I am merely here as a courtesy for an old friend.” He stepped back then, just out of Graham’s reach, and Gram didn’t argue, didn’t hold on, just stayed where he was, watching Hannibal through a shaggy fall of hair that probably could have used a wash.“And you, Agent Graham, are a grown man.If Jack trusts you to do your job in this… _condition_ , I have no place in questioning his judgement.”

 

And because he could taste Mischa sour in the back of throat, could smell her rolling off Graham’s clammy skin, could see her in the way Graham wavers on his feet, half-starved and unsteady _until the axe sunk wetly into her tiny skull and separated her face in an impossibly perfect split down the middle, Hannibal screamed himself raw and prayed to anything listening that the tiny upwards twitch of her mouth after the axe fell didn’t mean she_ felt _any of it because that was too horrible a thing to even comprehend—_

 

Hannibal could hardly breathe by that point, so he turned on his heel and left, straight down the steps without another word to Graham.He was nearly fifteen minutes down the highway before he even realized he’d forgotten Jack entirely.

 

They didn’t speak another word to each other for weeks, and when Jack brought Will Graham to his office that very first time, Hannibal even had the good grace to pretend it had never happened.

 

Will looked like he was chewing the inside of his lip raw the first week of their sessions, watched Hannibal like he was waiting for a bomb to go off when he thought the older man wasn’t looking, but he did the same.

 

Hannibal never smelled it on him again and he couldn't decide if he was disappointed in that. He wondered, sometimes, what Will might be like, loose and pliant like that, relaxed and pushing into Hannibal, panting sweet and warm against his skin for no other reason than the want to _touch_.

 

Hannibal doesn’t suppose he’s likely to find out.

 

 

*

 

He finds Will in his office. 

 

He understands this is the usual for him, these days--"Twenty-hour days," Dr. Katz had snapped when he'd asked, jabbing an accusing finger at Hannibal's chest, "And he seems to think _cigarettes_ and _coffee_ are _food_ so if you could maybe remind him that he's actually alive, that would be great."

 

She isn't angry at him. Why would she be? She has no idea, couldn't possibly know a thing except that she's worn out and tired too, and watching Will run himself desperately into the ground while she stood by, helpless, does not sit well with her. She is a woman of action and the sheer frustration at Will's refusal to allow her to help shows in the ragged way she scrubs her hands through her hair.

 

She couldn’t possibly know the stripes around Will’s wrists belong to him.He isn’t worried.She wouldn’t offer him directions to Will’s newest hiding place so easily if she suspected, would she, wouldn’t entrust him with the delicate balance Will is continually walking, and it is unfortunately only when Hannibal has dutifully made his way up the elevator to the seventh floor, turned right twice and opened the third door on the left that he realizes he has no idea what he’s going to say.

 

Will hears him open the door immediately, of course, and he goes stock-still, frozen with his back to his whiteboard and only the mere span of his desk standing between them.He’s wearing his glasses, but they don’t manage to distract from the shadows dragged deep below his eyes, the sharp hollow of his cheekbones.

 

Will was never a large man, but he looks positively shrunken now, transparent skin slung carelessly over bone into a hollow approximation of a man.The coffee mug in his hands slips, crashes to the floor, and Will doesn’t move a muscle, even as the hot liquid splashes over his feet.

 

“Hannibal,” he whispers, so soft Hannibal can barely hear, even across the scant few feet between them.“ _Hannibal.”_

 

He says it like a prayer.  

 

He does not smile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	5. interlude: she lied (she lied to the FBI)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i did a thing i dunno there's kind of sex???
> 
> i'm inebriated as shit, this may be a train wreck because i am a train wreck
> 
>  
> 
> xxx

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is Alana they send to him, after what Will can only assume was two and a half weeks of heated debate. They've kept their distance, Jack and Alana, impressively so, and although Beverly still makes vague unhappy noise about the state of Will's hair and clothes and existence, she has stopped papering his desk with pastel-slick literature for treatment centers Will would never visit.

 

And that's probably why Beverly was voted out, he thinks, because she can't hold her tongue to save her life. She'd do nothing but prod at Will ’til he snapped—she’s used to sawing open three ribcages before lunch, so she can't quite manage to step carefully in something as intangible as Will's mind.  

 

Will finds it kind of refreshing, honestly. He wishes they'd sent Beverly. He can handle Beverly.

 

But Alana's in her sweetest schoolteacher dress—faded vintage floral pattern, cabbage roses, paired with a pale pink cardigan and pearls.  It could not be more obvious she's trying to seem as nonthreatening as she can, but she's one of the privileged few with backstage access to the hateful insides of Will, and so he hopes she realizes she'll never be truly _safe._

 

She knocks on the frame of his office door and smiles, a slow little thing. Her nails are lacquered a dusky rose color. She never paints her nails. Too easy to chip them doing everyday things like opening her beers against the edge of her counter like she's still in college and that dishonesty, irrationally, is what sets Will's teeth locked together tight.  "May I?" she asks.

 

"Sure," he grinds out, and caps the pen he'd been scribbling commentary with. "Something you want?"

 

It's a testimony to how used to him she's become, probably, that his bristling doesn't deter her. She does close the door behind her, though, so she's not here for any reason that's likely to improve his mood. He stares into the dregs of coffee cooling in the bottom of his mug and wondered if he had time for a refill before the lecture began.

 

"Will," she says, so no, probably no time at all.  He scowls. She's giving him that _look_ again, the one that makes him feel about ten years old and he has papers to grade and dogs to feed and he does not want to do this right now.  He does not want to do this _ever._

 

"Will."

 

This is the reason, really, Will loathes Jack sometimes for every drawing him into this team. The crimes are horrible, naturally, but he is used to the nightmare of other people's minds--it's not as though he's ever required a _murder scene_ to slip into the skin of those unfamiliar monsters. It's not as though he'd ever been able to avoid it, really, and what a punch to the gut _that_ had been, the very first time he'd met his father's eyes over the windshield of a chipped toy racecar and realized the heat there was something considerably more than just liquor.

 

It's not like it's ever been pleasant, for Will.

 

But before, he had the luxury of leaving it behind on the road out to Wolf Trap. He could abandon it in the snow because there was nothing at home for him except a motley range of dogs--as few as six, as many as eleven, depending on when you asked--and dogs did not understand anything except that his hands were the hands that fed and cared for them. They licked the sweat from his skin when he shuddered awake, choking on the faint sound of a ship's horn at sea. They did not ask _questions._

 

That, Will thinks fiercely as Alana arranges herself in the solitary chair meant for students, is precisely why he has filled his house with animals instead of a family. He hates this with everything he has, loathes being accountable to her, because it snarls up guilty inside him that all he wants to do is shiver apart quietly. Alone.

 

She will not allow him that.

 

"Yes," he says finally, flat.  "Yes. What."

 

He doesn't meet her eyes. She doesn't try to force it, either, merely loops her hands around one knee and says, "We thought the time away would be good for you.  I did, anyways. Jack thought we should try to convince you to check in somewhere for a few weeks, just to be safe."

 

The way she says it makes it sound more like a resort than a hospital, but Will has spent a mandatory 72 hours in the facilities she's referring to more than once, and all he remembers is the way they spoke _about_ him, instead of _to_ him.  "I'm sure he did."

 

She frowns. "His intentions were good," she offers. "He doesn't...i don't think he knows what to do with you sometimes, exactly."

 

Will snorts. "He's hardly the first."

 

"And," she says, sharp, "normally, when an employee disappears for three weeks with, by the way, absolutely no documented communication about where he might have gone, that employee might have been a little more grateful to come back and find himself still employed, instead of questioning his friends' efforts to figure out why his impromptu vacation brought him back twenty pounds lighter, with an impressively developed _chain-smoking habit_ and severely disinclined to _stop_ himself long enough to eat an _actual meal._ "

 

Will flinches. That...alright. Alright, he might have maybe deserved that, because it's not like he's been doing the best job, attempting to drag himself through the day with any semblance of having it the fuck together. This, he thinks, petulant, is the unfair part of having actual people involved with him again.

 

"I'm sorry," he says. "I don't...I know I worried you. That I worry you. I’m sorry."

 

Alana huffs out an exasperated little sound. "Will, for God's sake, I don't want an apology. I'm asking you, as your friend, as your--whatever it is we are--" Will looks up sharply at that. "--to just _stop_ for a second and tell me what it is that's going on with you."

 

And for a second, for an awful, wailing second Will would. He'd spill it fast as he could, detail for her exactly what it is that's got him too sick to keep anything but watered down whiskey in his stomach.

 

_He fucked me,_ he'd say, wouldn't even matter which _he_ that meant because both would make her flinch, but only one would make her live it the tiniest bit, because she's been acquainted with Hannibal unbuttoned and undone too.  Will hopes Hannibal was kinder to her. He hopes Hannibal didn't _pick her apart like a dissection subject, didn't cleave her chest open and crack her bones and pin her spread wide, all her soft parts pulsing and tender as his heavy hands closed around her and, and—_

 

Will makes a tiny, ragged sound and sinks further down in his chair. Alana's not short, necessarily, but he's fairly sure she can't see anything of him behind the desk from elbows down. He's basing this on the fact that she's still standing there, mostly, because he is hideously, unfairly hard in the seconds it takes to remember to fill his lungs again.

 

"Will," she says, and she says it like she's crouched low in the brush at the side of the road, hand outstretched, coaxing a weary, filthy dog towards her with a shred of beef jerky.

 

Will isn't hungry. Hasn't been for _weeks._

 

"My mother passed away," he finds himself saying before he makes a conscious decision to say anything at all. He bites at his bottom lip hard enough to taste blood. "I went back home to, to--" _feel it again, feel like the world makes any kind of sense because there is a safety in being on my knees and Hannibal would keep me collared long as I'd ask him, but that's the problem, isn't it, it doesn't count if I ask_ "--visit an ex," he finishes lamely. "And, uh. Found out she died about a year back. No one told me."

 

It's half-true, he reminds himself, aching as the terse look on her face melts abrupt into pity and she reaches out to grasp his hands. He wants to remove her fingernails, pry them from the bed and let them _plink plink plink_ onto the cheap linoleum floor. He would save them. Make them into a necklace for Abigail, a choker, something gold-leafed and lovely to cover the purple slash of her scar.

 

_I have one now too, he wants to tell Abigail, wants to bare the stripe around his throat to her and show her he’s just the same except it isn’t, isn’t even close because it was Will’s daddy, too, and a collar older than she is and most importantly what happened to Abigail Hobbs was not her fault._

 

"Oh, _Will,"_ she breathes and just like that he's a friend again, not so strange, just a lonely little thing in need of her pity and she can relax enough to fold her fingers ‘round his. "I'm so sorry. Your father...?"

 

"Fine," Will says and then amends, "I mean it's, like, stage three lung cancer, so they're not thinking he'll make it to Christmas." 

 

Something in him thrills at that. He wouldn't go to the funeral, he thinks, but he wonders if he'd be able to coax Hannibal into fucking him, bent over his father's gravestone. Bets he could.  Bets Hannibal would _thrill_ at the thought, at the macabre implication of it and Will couldn’t care less about the literary value he just wants Hannibal’s _teeth_ in his _throat_ again, _okay._

 

His dick throbs against his thigh, hot and swollen and he's sure he must look flushed and maybe, hopefully, it just looks like embarrassment.

 

"And," Alana says after a few moments in which he is sure to breathe, swollen with fury and the want to _press her back into his bookshelves, to slide his hands along the generous curves of her thighs until his fingers press wet into the place her legs meet. He wants to drop to his knees between her splayed legs and nose into the slick of her, the sharp scent of arousal and he'd slide his tongue sharp inside pull the damp fabric of her panties aside and lick info her cunt before he ever bothered to kiss her._

 

_She wouldn’t complain.  She’s that kind of woman, she’s been fucked more than she’s been courted, and she’s half-sure she likes it that way—likes, anyways, that he’d go to his knees for her willingly.  He thinks she’d curl those rose nails tight into his hair and hang on for all she’s worth, thinks she’d ride him happily and maybe even choke him, if he asked nicely._

 

_He wants it. Wants her, legs wrapped around him, braced fruitlessly back against the books as he fucks up into her and bites a jagged necklace of bruises all around her throat and the soft slope of her collarbone.  He wants Hannibal to watch, wants him to press crudely, broad-fingered at the back of Will's head as he fucks his tongue shallowly into Alana, wants to feel the thick swell of him buried inside Will even as Will's got Alana writhing down onto his cock and he positively keens, caught there helpless, strung up between the two of them, anchored in one place at last._

 

"Will?" Alana asks again and her voice drags Will sharply back to himself,  echoing tinny in both ears.  "Will, are you okay? You're terribly flushed--"

 

_Bet I am,_ Will thinks roughly but he shakes his head.  "No, I--I always get sick when i fly, you know. Just a bit of a fever, I'll be fine. Twenty-four-hour bug or whatever.“

 

She fixes him with a blunt _are you kidding me_ look. "I live ten minutes away from here, if you need a ride when you wrap up," is all she says, though, and she squeezes his hands before letting go of them. "Try, please, to get a little bit of rest? Your students would be grateful too.”

 

“And,” she pauses, horribly poised with one foot out the door and a creeping discomfort crawling along the tense lines of her back, “If you want to talk about the, uh, the ex—promise you’ll call about that, too.”  She touches her throat where his marks are, presses in, so there’s no room for error.  Will chokes on the sudden well of shame hot and acrid on his tongue.

 

He promises her.  Promises three times and even holds up his cell phone to prove he has her number entered in right, _just in case,_ and he can see she doesn’t think he’ll call.  He sees it as she turns away from him and presses the button for the elevator, in the way her shoulders slump and she rearranges her sensible purse on her shoulder like it ways a dozen pounds more than it could possibly hold.  

 

She’s right.  He stays all night, staring blank at a Google search box and a flashing cursor and the words _what do I do what the fuck am i supposed to do now_ blurring black on the screen until the morning staff flicks the lights on.

 

He doesn’t think he slept.  Mostly, he doesn’t _think._


	6. it's been a long day, living with this--it's been a long time since I felt so sick

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yo this took forever
> 
> i am so sorry

 

There is a girl in a bar in Missouri named Lola—“don't you dare laugh," she'd warned as she watched him down his first two fingers of whiskey and saluted with her own half-empty Sam Adams bottle, "my momma had a trailer-trash romantic in her somewhere,”—and she knows. Knows what he is. Knows what he did. Where he's been.

 

She knows without Will having to say anything and it's not, it's _not_. He doesn't tell, okay, he's a grown man and so, so very practiced at biting his tongue. He wouldn’t— _can’t_ —bring himself to so much think about where he's just been, never mind rehashing it with a total stranger. He came here for one reason: he'd just passed through three dry counties and it's almost impossible to find a bar open at nine-forty am on a Sunday.

 

Plus, it's the kind of place he'd loved as a kid—smells like sweat and smoke, lit only by beer signs and a pinball machine that's on its last legs, judging by the atonal way it pings every so often. Feels...not _comforting_ , exactly, but his hands don't shake so bad when he smooths then over the scarred bartop, so. Small victories.

 

But Lola—a riot of messy bottle blonde curls, strawberry lip gloss bright and sticky on her wide smile, can't be a day over nineteen despite the obvious implants, but she grins like she's got a knife between her teeth—drops bright brown eyes to his throat the moment he settles his weary bones into a vacant barstool and starts, "What'll it be, honey, you need a phone or the shelter number—“

 

"Whiskey," he husks out and it's the first thing he's said aloud in the past three states. “Please.”  His voice cracks halfway through the word. Lola laughs.

 

"Fair enough," she says, already reaching for a bottle half-filled with amber liquid, and sporting a suspiciously homemade label. "You lookin' for taste or quantity?"

 

"Just keep pouring."  He curls his fingers around the tumbler she drops with an expert _thunk_ onto the bartop. "I'll tell you when to stop."

 

She tilts her head. "Can't let you drive," she offers. "Bar policy." She jerks a thumb at a sign pinned behind the register reading: "don't drunk drive—don’t be a dick" in flaking paint. Will snorts, but surrenders his keys.

 

"Now that we got all that unpleasantness out of the way," she says and pours and pours and pours and doesn't stop till Will gives her a sharp nod, "why don'tcha tell me what you're doin' up here so far from home?"

 

It's only then that Will realizes his accent's back in full-force, slipping sweet and heavy off his tongue like he’d never left only he had, he _had_. "Home's Virginia," he mutters, automatic, stares into his drink like there's something other than indeterminate fingerprints to be found at the bottom of the glass.

 

"You don't sound much like a Virginia boy." 

 

Will shrugs one shoulder. Doesn't look up at her, cause she hasn't stopped staring at the sharp jut of his collarbones yet, and stupid, _stupid_ , he'd been wearing his shirts buttoned all up for months now, got right back into that wretched old habit like he'd never shaken it, but he'd let himself get lazy in Louisiana. All he's got on is a threadbare old Pantera t-shirt and a ratty pair of jeans he'd liberated from his— _the cabin_ , he'd stolen it from the _cabin_. And because he's already been stupid, of course, the trend just fucking carries on and he doesn't even think about it, just says, "yeah, I was down in Louisiana visiting family," and then his breath hitches in his throat. What did he say. _What did he say._

 

Stupid.

 

He risks the brief glance up and she's looking at him the way Bev does sometimes, soft and sad and a little confused, but she's a good ol' southern girl, too, so it's not much of a leap for her to read between the lines. Maybe it happened to a friend of hers. Maybe it happened to her, maybe she left a Samuel of her own in some backwater town and drove far as she could, fast as she could, whole life crammed into a duffel bag in the passenger seat of a car a decade older than her, 'til her heart stopped stuttering every time she saw cop lights, 'til she was good and _gone._

 

Maybe. Maybe she's just sweet.

 

Blessedly, she keeps her mouth shut. She's a fuckin' angel, because she doesn't ask anything, doesn't say she's sorry or—worse—that she _understands_ , but she pulls the bottle from the shelf and sets it on the bar in front of him.

 

"On the house," she says, gives him a crooked little grin. "Look like you could use a little bit of kindness."

 

Will doesn't laugh. He wants to, but she’s looking at him all wide-eyed like she honestly thinks there’s something wrong with him whiskey can fix, and his momma didn’t raise him much, but she didn’t raise him _rude._ Doesn’t laugh, carefully does not laugh, but he drinks, empties his glass and fills another all without even attempting eye contact, as she sips her sweating beer and watches him not watch her.

 

"What's your name, cowboy?" She asks finally, and she'll see it on his debit card anyways, so he says, simply,

 

"Will. Graham."

 

"Will Graham," she repeats and finishes off her beer. "Anyone missing you back home, Will?"

 

He's sure she's asking because he looks—he looks rough, alright, he looks really rough, can't remember the last time he showered or shaved or had a decent meal, can't even remember the last two hundred miles he'd driven, and he’d woken up more than once _next_ to his car, rather than _in_ it, and it's likely she just wants to know who to call if he loses his shit in her bar, but.

 

(Hannibal. He can’t—he misses Hannibal like he'd miss a knocked-out tooth, keeps running over and over the placid way he'd smiled and bid Will a safe trip and kissed his forehead as Will stood stock-still, caught in the doorframe like a pinned bug, gutted in Hannibal’s foyer, and it's sore, like he's running his tongue over a bloody, gaping hole in his mouth.)

 

He rounds his shoulders. "Doubt it."

 

"Aww, come on. Cutie like you?" She leans against the bar with her chin propped on her hand. "I find that hard to believe."

 

Will snorts.

 

"Hey," she says as she cracks another beer fetched from the squat fridge beneath the bar—Guinness this time—“girls like self-confidence, Will Graham."

 

Something must show on his face, something has to—-he refuses to think it's just there on his skin, for anyone to see, though experience indicates otherwise and he wants to peel it off, stop anyone looking at him ever again—because after a few missed beats she says, tentative, "Or...guys do too, probably?"

 

Will isn't in the mood to talk. Will is _never_ in the mood to talk but he really isn't in the mood now, really just wants to drink himself blind and crawl into the backseat of his car to sleep it off.  He'd happily trade the way he wakes up every morning with his brain stuffed full of needles and cotton batting for the dull, sick buzzing behind his eyes (echoing, the sound of a thousand tattoo guns on bared skin, a million tiny waves breaking on the hull of a ship in the middle of a hurricane) to just _stop_ for a moment.

 

He just wants quiet.

 

She gave him whiskey, though. A decent amount of whiskey. And if Will understands anything, he surely understands exchange.  He owes her something, right.  Should offer some kind of explanation for the bruises smeared across his pale throat, since she's refrained, thus far, from calling the cops on him, despite what's clearly dried blood flecked across the faded collar of his t-t-shirt.  Even so, it kinda surprises him when he offers, completely unprompted, first time he's said it aloud, even to himself, "His name is Hannibal."

 

"For real?" She arches one pencilled eyebrow. "Like...Carthage? The guy with the elephants?"

 

Will bares his canines in something that isn't quite a smile. "Yeah. Like that."

 

"Must be somethin'," she says.

 

Will thinks of large hands wrapped around his wrists and pork medallions and immaculate silverware crossed on monogrammed napkins.  Thinks of bones bleached white in meager winter sun and the perfect arc of a velvety crown tine pushed wet through the soft belly of a young woman he'd never met.  

 

"Yeah," he agrees. "Yeah, he is."

 

*

 

He doesn't _think._

 

That's what Hannibal does to him, what Hannibal has always done to him—blessedly divorced him from his brain for a while, kept him so intrigued that his thoughts had no spare room to corkscrew inwards—and it is only after his knees have hit the ground with a jarring _thud_ that he even realized he's fallen.

 

No. No, wait, that isn't right, he didn’t—he didn't fall, he knelt. 

 

He's on his knees at Hannibal's feet, his head tilted back at a wretched angle like he's trying to blind himself staring into  the sun.  It isn't a bad metaphor.

 

Hannibal doesn't seem put off by it, but why would he? He's seen worse—pulled worse—from between Will's birdcage ribs without even trying. This shouldn't be embarrassing, not after the ways Hannibal has watched him crumble, but Will can feel his face burning bright and hot as he tilts his head back and bares his throat.

 

Hannibal does not take the bait, though his eyes do catch on the yellowed marks across Will's neck and hold for a bare, narrow-eyed moment. Hannibal is cataloging him, marking the damage off a mental checklist like this is a walkthrough of a new-purchased home, and Hannibal is deciding which bits need fixing first.

 

Will couldn't tell him, even if he asked. 

 

Hannibal remains infuriatingly still, though, free hand tucked into the pocket of his trousers as he watches Will knelt in the center of his own classroom, slacks stained through with cooling coffee, shoulders gone slack, knobby wrists crossed over each other already, like he's just waiting for the rope to make it official.

 

The door is open. Anyone passing by could see.

 

And that's a thought, isn't it, Will thinks, hitching up so the thick line of his dick presses against his elbows where they're all jumbled in his lap and—and he's hard already, harder than he's been able to get himself in weeks.

 

Will is in way over his head. 

 

Hannibal didn't even have to say anything, hasn't so much as moved from the doorway, and here Will is, rutting up against what little pressure he can manage, hoping—no.  That isn't right.  It's _praying_ , Hannibal's name is the closest thing to a deity he's ever had and he wants desperately to worship with every flushed and pitiful angle of himself.  Wants Hannibal _inside_ him and wrapped around him and _crushing him_ , pinning him to that broad chest so Will can never forget he's there, and if that's what people get out of church, Will gets it. He wants Hannibal to break him open and stitch him back together, wants Hannibal to pick those stitches—white silk, probably, because Hannibal has a quiet flair for the dramatic, and would like the way the silk stained as it slid through his skin—out with his teeth, wants it to scar forever and ever _amen._

 

_The way you mark me's the only ring I'd ever need_ , he doesn't say. "Fuck me," he breathes instead, turns his wrists up, offering. " _Please_."

 

Hannibal could leave the door open, and Will would happily let him. It's not like Hannibal has anything to lose here, really, because he can't see Jack or Alana being all that surprised, considering the way Will and Hannibal tangle together already, all copper wiring and wicked thorns.

 

He'd stay dressed for it, Will imagines, because he's hardly shy about his nudity in the comfort of his own office, but outside the confines of that space the suits and the cufflinks are a necessary armor. Sheep's clothing—he looks too predatory, otherwise, all the flat animal planes of him, thick slabs of muscle belying his mild-mannered psychiatrist's routine.  So he'd strip Will only bare as he had to—slacks shoved down to his knees, hobbling him, shirt rucked up under his armpits like this is a prison-yard fumble instead of...whatever it actually is.

 

And he wouldn't get the panting, adoring Hannibal, the one who whispers soft things in languages Will does not speak into his ears. The one that traces the curve of his jawbone just after he's come down Will's throat, the pad of his thumb navigating the ridge of bone like it's made of rice paper.  That Hannibal is a private one. He wouldn't be put on display like that.

 

Instead, he thinks Hannibal would shove him facedown across his desk, a conscious echoing of that rattling first time they’d done this, Will's hips bruised in repeat by the steel edging of the desk. Hannibal would take him apart in full view of anyone who wanted to witness Will as he actually is, anyone who's ever wanted to stick him with a pin to see if he bled.

 

Hannibal would tie his wrists behind his back. Would leave him teetering on the edge of the desk, trying desperately to brace himself on his chest even as he twisted around, hoping to keep Hannibal in his line of sight even if it’s worse, always so much worse when he sees it coming. 

 

Hannibal would fuck him like that, would clamp a hand tight over his mouth and shove up into him with little more than some cursory fingering, helped along by the cheap store-brand lotion Will keeps on his desk. He'd hold Will up like he’s nothing, fingernails biting cruel into the meat of his cheek and he would fuck him 'til Will’s sobs finally drew someone to the open door.

 

And he wouldn't stop. He wouldn't even _pause,_ would just clamp his fingers tighter over Will's mouth and snarl to him _that's it, move just like that, good boy, that's right, come on, put some effort into it, it's like fucking a corpse when you just lay there you stupid little fuck and—_ no.  No.

 

That is not Hannibal's design.

 

"No," Hannibal agrees, mild. "That doesn’t seem very much like me." Will cringes, ducks his head down close to his own chest because why, why on _earth_ had he said any of that aloud? He'd meant only to offer _I miss you_ and _I'm sorry_ , but he doesn't know how to apologize any other way than bent over his desk.

 

He doesn't know how to do _anything._

 

"Hush," Hannibal says and Will must still be doing it, must still be actually saying what he's thinking and what is the _matter with him_ , it's like he's popped a spring and shaken apart. It's terrifying.  He bites down on his bottom lip, hard, anchoring his mouth shut with gritted teeth.  "Will."

 

Will screws his eyes shut tight. Hannibal has no right. No right to say his name like that, like it's a mouthful of expensive scotch, like Hannibal is savoring this somehow.

 

His office door clicks shut and Will can breathe again, kind of.  The sound of the deadbolt clunking into place jolts him like a starting gun, though, and he keeps low to the ground, near-crawling, as he closes the gap between them. He doesn't touch Hannibal— _that’s important, never touch first_ —but he huddles gratefully at his feet and cocks a weird, tentative grin up at him. Waits with his hands at Hannibal's belt for a minute nod to continue, but once he's been given permission—

 

Will sucks cock like a pro. He knows that. He's been told that by enough men—men he wasn't related to, thank you—that he had a mouth made for it, his gag reflex so eroded by years of mornings spent doubled-up over the bathroom sink that he doesn't even protest when Hannibal grips a tight  handful of his hair and shoves halfway in without bothering to warn Will.

 

Will doesn't choke, or at least not very much, and Hannibal doesn't push after that. Doesn't move much at all, actually, but lets Will work at his cock with what finesse he can manage. Will swallows him gratefully, shoves his nose into the warm crinkle of hair just under the slight curve of Hannibal's belly and breathes in French cologne and a slight tang of sweat.  It's far from comfortable, and his jaw's aching already but the heft of Hannibal on his tongue, the press of tight skin at the roof of his mouth more than makes up for it and Will sets a sloppy rhythm, head bobbing unsteadily between Hannibal's legs.

 

Hannibal has one perfectly-polished shoe pressed down on Will's hands, heel biting deep where they're crossed in his lap.  He's leaning a considerable weight into it, too, doesn’t seem unbalanced in the least as Will strains to stay upright.  The whole time, his hips are steadily bucking up into the pressure, even as a low whine rattles from deep in his chest.

 

He can't ask for what he wants. He doesn't think he could come up with the right words if he tried because he has been trying for the better part of twenty-eight years and Hannibal has come the closest out of all of them.  

 

Well.  Except.

 

It's probably rude to be thinking of someone else with his mouth full of his—friend’s? shrink’s?—dick, so be very stubbornly doesn't. Drives the thought away and crushes it downdowndown somewhere small and dark by letting the wet length of Hannibal slip from his mouth to slide slick across his cheek as he ducks down to nose at Hannibal's balls.

 

Hannibal finally makes a noise at that, just a sharp little intake of air and nothing more, as Will sucks at the soft skin, works it gently with tongue and the barest edge of teeth.  "Will," Hannibal breathes, and Will bites back a cry as the heel grinds down harder into his hands.

 

He's so hard it _hurts_ and he pushes up best he can, works up with a soft little sob, begging for harder, more, _anything_ but this constant boiling pressure between his thighs, except then Hannibal is gripping his hair again and pushing back into his mouth.  Will can't really breathe like that, can he, can't inhale at all with his nose crushed into Hannibal's belly and the pace Hannibal sets is _brutal._ Unyielding. He fucks Will's mouth like a buck mounting a doe, with an absolutely feral precision.  It is only as he's curling thick fingers around the curve of Will's skull, only as he's grunting out some approximation of Will's name as he comes—sharp, warmwet all down his throat—that Will even realizes his legs are shaking, realizes he’s shuddering his way through aftershocks. He hadn't even noticed. 

 

Hannibal doesn't say anything for a long moment, though he does slip out of Will's slack mouth and remove his heel from where he's got Will's wrists pinned to the cheap carpet.  It’s horrifyingly polite.

 

Will doesn't look up. He thinks he might be choking on his own heartbeat. His slacks are damp at the knees with coffee and at the front with a potentially terrible decision and still, he's hard. Still, he'd be happy to let Hannibal roll him over, if he wanted.

 

Kinda wants Hannibal to, actually.

 

Instead, there's a slight rustling of expensive cloth and then Hannibal is crouching before him. He's sat back on his haunches, mostly eye-to-eye with Will and he's gentle about hooking his thumbs behind Will' jaw.  Presses to tilt his head up but not to bruise, smooths the pads of his thumbs in slow, dragging circles.  Soothing.

 

When Will dares to drag his gaze up above the still-immaculate knot of Hannibal's tie, Hannibal is smiling at him. 

 

"I am not your father," Hannibal says, and it isn't the first time Will's heard it, not by a long shot.

 

It is, though, the first time Hannibal follows it with, "But I intend to remove him for you, Will."

 

Oh.

 

_Oh._


	7. you recognize this shape? it's the back of your head

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks to all y'all for being so sweet and encouraging about the trash party i'm throwing here <3

After--well.  

 

_After_.

 

Will is an avowed agnostic but he twists under Hannibal like Saint Sebastian anyways, golden and lovely and pinned flat on his back like he's studded through with crossbow bolts.

 

[Hannibal can practically hear the brittle-branch cracking of bone and he imagines it might be beautiful, razor-white shards against dusky wood. Will wouldn't scream, he wouldn't be able to with the breath punched so neatly out of him, wouldn't be able to do much more than heave these great, wracking sobs as Hannibal pressed curious fingertips into where Will's skin split apart.  

 

[Hannibal wants to drink him dry.]

 

*

 

The only sound--save for the uneven thudding of his own heartbeat in his ears, that unforgiving reminder--is Will's breath, ragged and wet and panted out against the once-crisp lines of Hannibal's trousers. They are [they always have been] alone. Only one lock is flipped on the door, but no one's come because Will has been quiet and Will has been _good_.

 

Hannibal doesn't speak. Will doesn't dare. He just shivers against Hannibal's shin like he's freezing, desperate to shake some warmth into his heavy bones.

 

Eventually: "Will."

 

"Please don't," Will says immediately and he doesn't look up, spider-leg lashes drawing hollow, spiked shadows over his cheekbones. He's too thin.  "Can't. Not yet."

 

So Hannibal doesn't. He lets Will shiver against him and only tangles a hand in his hair when Will pushes insistent up into the touch because he knows what this is, he's studied sexual deviance enough to know what this is, and silence is not the appropriate thing to offer Will here. He should have comfort and soft, meaningless sentiment licked into his skin and there should be someone to wrap themselves around him while he shakes all to pieces.  But they are not--they _don't_. They don't touch outside of these brief, violent collisions. They aren't lovers. Hannibal doesn't get to offer comfort when he is the one wringing blood from the proverbial stone.

 

He is not _allowed_ and he is so rarely disallowed anything that he honestly isn't sure what to do with it. Does he, does he say something here, does he pull Will to his feet, is there something that will snap him back to himself and have him shoving himself upright and stop that awful, blank expression--?

 

He doesn't know. He scratches his blunt nails against Will's scalp instead, because it works with Will's dogs and Hannibal always suspected he took some social cues from them. 

 

"I can hear you thinking," Will says instead and Hannibal is startled by his own laugh. "Stop it," Will murmurs, but it's fond.

 

He sounds tired, dazed and a little strung out and that's--normal, from what Hannibal's read, perhaps the first thing Will's done in his vicinity that falls definitively into that spectrum. His hands still dangle, boneless in his lap like he's never even thought of moving them himself, and there is a sharp, red line diagonal across Will's left wrist where Hannibal's heel had pressed and crushed.

 

_Did you want that,_ Hannibal doesn't ask because empathy is Will's gift, not his, and he doesn't know what the demure slope of Will's spine means. He's sure he could coax Will into anything like this, though, wind himself right up into that lizard hindbrain and offer the orders he so desperately wants to follow.  

 

_I could make you do anything_ , Hannibal doesn't say.

 

Will wants, so sweetly, so simply, so completely to be deconstructed. He wants permission to crumble. He wants Hannibal--though Hannibal is not blind enough to believe this means anything because Will would hand himself over to the first person who hinted at wanting any facet of him--to take his reins.  

 

"I want to talk about this," he says and closes a hand over the back of Will's neck, neatly encompassing the faint pink stripe of scar tissue.  Will doesn't cringe, exactly, but it's a near miss.

 

"Why," he says, and it's suddenly flat, dull as stainless steel, muttered mostly to the tops of Hannibal's shoes. It sounds like he's chewing glass. He tries to duck down, tries to curl up into himself and Hannibal's grip on his hair hauls him back upright. Will, seemingly in spite of himself, makes a tiny appreciative noise.  He licks at his split lip. "Why?" he repeats. 

 

Hannibal doesn't have an answer.

 

*

 

Hannibal does not actually want Will's explanations. It doesn't matter to him _why_ \--Graham Senior had bitten to break skin and it's the brand that matters, swollen pink and angry, permanent as a tattoo against the pallid expanse of Will's hip.

 

[he stares at it, sometimes, stares and does not dare to touch it because he wants so badly to cut it from Will, to peel the skin away and let it heal pink and new, and he has never wanted to strip _anything_ from Will before.]

 

It's not as though Will doesn't try, darling thing, not as though Hannibal isn't deliberately biting the countless "I'm so, i'm so sorr--" and "stop, stop that, I wanna--" from his bruised mouth before he can say anything more foolish than _stop_.

 

[he should stop, he is _civilized_ , he is _above this_ but Will makes this gentle, gutted sound as Hannibal noses aside the collar of his shirt and sucks a furious mark into the place where neck meets shoulder.  It is a careful exercise of self-control that his teeth don't come away bloodied.

 

[Hannibal is civilized but Hannibal is also, unfortunately, human.

 

[He does not stop.]

 

Hannibal is, for the first time in his adult memory, not entirely in control of himself. He tears at Will's dismal layers of denim and flannel, shoves the ugly sweater down Will's sharp-boned shoulders with only one of the two locks on the door shut. 

 

He does not take risks. He does not do _dangerous_ in any sense that could apply to his own well-being. He has thrived for one reason and one reason only--he is smart.  They could, realistically, be interrupted by any member of staff with access to the building, and Hannibal is not a stupid man, but this is _stupid_.

 

And still. 

 

He presses Will back on his desk and it burns in the pit of his belly, that slicksweet gnawing hunger that makes itself known every time Will grinds out his name like that, like he's pleading for water after two days in the desert.  Hannibal makes this wordless noise, this approximation of a snarl and sweeps an impatient arm over the top to dispose of Will's ever-growing collection of coffee mugs. 

 

Will grunts a tiny protest into Hannibal's mouth as they crash to the carpet, but his hips continue to stutter into where Hannibal's shoved, dull as butter knives, into all the unfamiliar hollows of him.  Hannibal's fingers skate over the ripple of newly-visible ribs, and the grip that eventually crushes over Will's crossed wrists is _furious_.

 

"You haven't been eating," Hannibal rumbles into his ear, low and disapproving and it makes Will twist sudden against him, try to curl away. Hannibal lifts Will's wrists, then slams them cruelly back down, shoves the knobby bone hard into the wood veneer of Will's desk. Will doesn't make a sound and he doesn't fight it--he goes abruptly still, in fact, so still he might be a corpse save for the frantic rise-fall-rise of that sickly ribcage. It does not improve Hannibal's mood in the least. "You have, from the looks of it, become especially disinterested in caring for yourself since--" and he bites it off there, because after all this time he's still unsure of what to call it, this new fracture between them. 

 

[and it is a fracture, something glittering and broken, snapped bone, broken teeth stretching between them because Hannibal had never been deluded enough to believe he understood Will Graham completely--he suspects that's an honor afforded to no one, including Will himself--but he thought--

 

[Well. He didn't expect _this_.]

 

Hannibal only realizes he's grinding his teeth when his jaw begins to ache and he immediately looses Will's wrists to pull at his belt. Will, obedient as ever, does not move his arms, keeps them pinned above his head as though it was more than Hannibal's weight keeping him there. He stays instead eerily pliant, his single visible eye slanting up to meet Hannibal's.  "Since," Will offers, hushed, as though it's a complete sentence in and of itself.

 

"You are an infuriating man, Will Graham," Hannibal informs him and is rewarded with the edge of a canine just visible in Will's scruffy attempt as a beard. Hannibal honestly cannot tell if it is a smile or a grimace but they sometimes look exactly the same on Will anyways, so it likely doesn't matter much. "What ever shall I do with you," he deadpans and Will laughs.

 

"This seemed like a promising direction." He tilts his head up in what's probably meant as a challenge, but with his face flushed all the way down to the collarbone and his pupils blown wide and senseless, it hardly seems like he's promising a fight.

 

Hannibal spreads a hand flat over the center of Will's chest and presses in, harder than is strictly necessary. Will bares his throat further at that, accompanies it with one of those low, animal moans and he so clearly wants that grip wrapped around his throat, but Hannibal does not move. Presses down harder, in fact, until Will grits out "Hurts."

 

"Yes," Hannibal agrees into the ropy muscle pulled tense in Will's shoulder and follows it with teeth, crushes down sharp and punishing until Will's breath hitches.

 

He fucks Will over his desk, then, and he does not regret it. Not precisely, because Hannibal has never done anything he didn't truly mean to.

 

_However_.

 

He also does not like to think about the bruises littered down Will's sternum, because Hannibal is not meant to participate in that without Will asking.  Without Will pleading. It is not his game to play, _not his design_ , as Will had pointed out and never, not once, has Hannibal ever wanted to hurt someone he did not eventually kill, because Hannibal is not--that isn't _why_. It isn't about pain.

 

He is a monster, perhaps, but he has never wanted to hurt so much as he has wanted to eliminate and this is new. Alien and frightening and unexpected [which, note: Hannibal does not care for, he is a creature of habit] but Will positively _keened_ when Hannibal shoved him facedown against the surface of his desk.

 

Will had, however, been very much unable to ask for anything at all with Hannibal's thick fingers prying his mouth open and holding tight.

 

[Will is easiest to manage, granted, when he is pliant and quiet. Lithium has done wonders to soothe him in his more agitated states in the past but that is so hugely different from this. 

 

It isn't an excuse. There is no excuse.]

 

Will only made soft, wet noises, though, and bucked back hard enough to bruise himself on the ridges of Hannibal's pelvis, so he figured there's no reason to assume his advances weren't wanted.

 

[later, because a rational Hannibal is horrified by that more than anything, the idea that he'd been among the ranks of countless people who had so completely ignored Will's agency, he will press his fingers gentle to the bruises and whisper apologies into the snarl of Will's hair.

 

Will goes abruptly stiff and silent at that, and when Hannibal offers nothing more than a warm mouth at the nape of his neck, says, "I'm fine, it's nothing, it--it was nothing," and Hannibal, there's a precise twisting of claws in the pit of his stomach where the hunger lives because Will, somehow, genuinely means that and it is _horrible_.]

 

For now, though, Hannibal silently cleans Will up and tucks his clothes back into place--though he is less a few buttons and his hair is sticking up in the back where Hannibal's fingers had curled sudden and dragged Will back--and all the while, Will only stares blankly down at his own feet. One shoelace is untied. He makes no move to correct it. His eyes close and they do not open again for a long time.

 

"I have missed you," Hannibal says eventually and Will nods, though Hannibal can't tell if Will can actually hear a thing he's saying. He doesn't expand further on the topic, if he has any opinions.

 

"Let me take you home." Hannibal offers after a few moments and Will, impossibly, does.

 

 

*

 

Alana had shown up at his doorstep unannounced, which was...unusual. She had made a cavalier habit of it those sweet few weeks he'd tumbled her into bed--proving a point to themselves, that's all it had been, because Alana is lovely and Hannibal has no patience for perfect things, just as she has no patience for men that keep secrets, and she has never asked Hannibal, but she has always known--but since they've tentatively resumed their friendship, she tends to call first.

 

Also, she is angry. She is never angry at Hannibal.

 

"Hello," he offers warily as he opens the door and she only scowls.

 

"Has he been showing up to his sessions?" She doesn't wait for an invitation beyond him shifting out of the doorway, and he steps aside as she stalks down his hallway and into the kitchen. 

 

There is no need for him to ask who she's referring to. Hannibal has, out of sheer force of habit, kept a regular rotation of seasonal beers for her in the fridge, and she pries one open using a ring on her middle finger, an unusual show of crassness for her. He waits as she drinks, and smiles when she eyes the label appreciatively.  

 

"It's good," she allows, and the mere presence of the beer seems to relax the razor tension of her shoulders. It is a habit gleaned from her mother at a young age. He wonders whether or not she's made the connection. 

 

"I was trying something new, with...elderflower, I believe? I'm glad it's acceptable."

 

Her grin is crooked, and tired. And although he did not want her in the way he craves Will, he suddenly misses the simplicity of waking up to her tangle of curls and gentle snores against his bare shoulder. Alana was--Alana _is_ \--so much less complicated. So willing to tell him exactly what's on her mind, rather than making him tear it from her, still-beating and what does Will have, what is it that's got its claws into him.  "I'm sorry for barging in here," she says finally and Hannibal shrugs one shoulder, dismissive.

 

"You seem distressed. I haven't known you to worry over nothing before."

 

"It's Will," she says and of course it is, because it is always Will lately.  "He's...I don't know. I don't know what's happened to him."

 

Hannibal does not move. He does not offer anything beyond a curious tilt of the head. Alana picks at her nail polish--strange, her nails are usually neat and unlacquered--and a tiny frown wrinkles between her eyebrows.  "What is it, Alana," he says finally because he knows that set to her mouth, he knows the way she's fidgeting. Knows it's something that's got hold of her now and he often thinks Alana too intelligent for her own good.

 

"He," she starts and pauses, makes a tiny moue of distaste. "What are you _doing_ with him. What did you do to him?" she says finally, flat. Her hands are balled into small fists around the beer bottle, her grip pale and furious.

 

She is _never_ angry with him.

 

"Do you even know?" Her shoulders slump. "Christ, Hannibal, I--I don't know if I should hit you or report you, but. You can't keep on--He's not _ready_ , you can't possibly think this is _healthy_."

 

Hannibal stills. "Pardon?" he manages finally. 

 

"Oh, don't," Alana says, and her face crumples--she is hurt he would lie to her.  "I heard you. Yesterday, in his office, I--I came to drop off some paperwork from Jack and yes, Hannibal I heard you and I heard him and _he is your patient_ and--"

 

And what, he never exactly finds out because he offers _I don't_ know _what I'm doing_ in a voice trembling enough to be believable.

 

Alana is a brilliant woman, but she wants so badly for him to be a man. She wants so much for the broken bits of him to be as simple as this.

 

It is easy, to burrow into her shoulder and allow her to soothe her conscience. Allow her to smooth her hands down his back and offer soft, useless reassurances.

 

It is easy.

 

It is so _easy_.

 

*

 

The dogs nose at them both, a mass of wriggling bodies and tails thumping against each other as they vie for the attention Will has probably been denying them, well. Since. 

 

Hannibal's favorite, the long-haired mutt with the intelligent face and the splatters of spots like mud splashed across his muzzle, paws at Will's shins with a high, urgent whine.

 

"Winston," Will chides, and Hannibal stands in the kitchen doorway and watches as Will feeds them, at the familiar way they mill about him, only occasionally snapping at each other as the food disappears.  When that happens, Will kicks them apart, not cruelly, but as though he were the alpha dog positioning himself between them.  Hannibal has always liked his pragmatism.

 

"Afraid I don't have anything much to offer you," Will says to him finally after the pack is fed and watered. He does not look at Hannibal, but instead continues to watch the dogs. "Got plenty of whiskey, but I doubt it's to your taste."  That doesn't stop Will from pouring himself a drink into a plastic--plastic! Will is _thirty-eight_ \--tumbler.

 

Hannibal wonders if the short, clipped sentences are deliberate or, for that matter, even really conscious. "You would be surprised at my tastes, I think." When he reaches for the nearest half-full bottle with a label he doesn't recognize, Will raises an eyebrow. Hannibal unscrews the cap--the _cap_ , what hell is Wolf Trap--and tries not to wince at the taste.

 

Just because he can doesn't mean he necessarily should.

 

"Yeah, maybe I would," Will allows, watching Hannibal now over the rim of his glass. He drinks the swill happily, though, so it's very possible Hannibal has been overestimating Will's appreciation of his cooking for months.

 

They drink and watch the dogs in something approaching companionable silence, Hannibal handing over the bottle when Will's emptied his glass. They pass it back and forth after, and Hannibal's belly has begun to burn almost pleasantly enough to distract from the taste when Will blurts, "Do you actually like that? The--what we do?"

 

Hannibal sees no reason to lie to the man. He shrugs. "It is hardly my preference. I wouldn't say I necessarily find it distasteful."

 

"Great," Will says. "That's fucking--why didn't you _tell_ me, Jesus." He scrubs a hand over his eyes and lets it slide over his mouth, holds it there. When he passes off the bottle next, he doesn't even look at Hannibal. 

 

"It wasn't a hardship, Will."

 

Will snorts. "You have an amazing talent for saying exactly the wrong thing."

 

"You know what I'm trying to say."

 

"No." Will snatches the bottle back. "No, you know what, I don't. Don't--don't make me _read_ you, Hannibal. You aren't supposed to be like the rest of them, okay, just talk to me. Like this was--I don't know, someone else. Someone normal."

 

Hannibal frowns. "I don't think you're abnormal, Will."

 

"Then you're an idiot," Will snaps. "Then you're blind as well, you're--you should be able to see this, why can't you _see this_?" He makes an abrupt gesture like he wants to take hold of Hannibal and shake him, but he snatches his hand back and says, "I will ruin you, do you understand that? I will ruin you and I won't even be sorry because I'll be able to _have_ you and that is not normal, Hannibal.  I'm sorry for you if you think it is."

 

"However you are is however you are. I have no plans to change you."

 

"You want me to be a killer. Like you."

 

"Yes."

 

"You think I'm a killer now. Even if--you think I've always been a killer, I just haven't killed anybody yet."

 

Hannibal smiles at that, a placid thing that makes the tendon in Will's jaw pulse harder. "I thought you didn't want to read me?"

 

Will only looks at him, considering, as though this is the first time he has realized that Hannibal meant the constant reassurances that he did not plan to kill Will at the end of this, that he did not plan to kill Will ever.  Hannibal has a moment--only a beat, really--to wonder if that surety, that one way or another Hannibal would be the end of him, is what's had him so pliant.

 

And, impressively quick for a man who's just downed a fifth of whiskey on an empty stomach, Will runs.

 

It takes a second for Hannibal to realize the door is open. In that second, Will's already tearing a frantic line for the trees, his booted feet ripping through the knee-high grass and catching, unsteady. He stumbles twice before Hannibal even moves.

 

Hannibal doesn't think. Hannibal never does anything before he's considered a plan of escape--or attack, for that matter--but he's down the front steps before he quite processes what has happened.

 

The dogs prance a merry trail after, as though this is part of a game which, Hannibal supposes, isn't very far off.

 

Will is, in spite of the whiskey now sloshing in Hannibal's belly, far too easy to catch. He stumbles a few times more, granted, and the moments he spends scrabbling in the dirt let Hannibal reach him easily, but. Will is a dozen years his junior, should, by all rights be more fit than this. 

 

Hannibal tackles him around the waist and Will goes down hard, slamming to his knees in the brittle grass. He _howls_ , thrashing in Hannibal's grip like a wild animal, snaps at Hannibal's face when he comes too close. The dogs have stopped, ten paces back, watching wary and whining as he brings Will inelegantly to the ground with an arms wrapped crushing around his throat. He pants into Will's ear, "and what is this, _mano meile_ , what are we doing." 

 

"No idea," Will huffs out into the grass and then he's moving again, kicking out sharp at the place where Hannibal's knee bends.  It is all Hannibal can do to hang on.

 

Will drives an elbow into the softest part of Hannibal's belly and twists away when Hannibal grunts, surprised, and lets go. Will whips around to face him, surges to his feet, and Hannibal has only a moment to see his face, flushed and bright and grinning reckless, before Will is lunging at him again, swinging a punch that cracks across Hannibal's cheekbone like a shot.

 

[it will bruise and swell and leave him unable to see properly for nearly a week, but Hannibal will touch it every time he looks in the mirror and smile faintly--Will looked _happy_.]

 

Hannibal catches Will square in the solar plexus with his shoulder and Will heaves backwards, gasping for breath. He spits blood into the dirt, wipes his forearm across his mouth. It comes back smeared red. Will grimaces.

 

"You're not even trying," he says, petulant as a child. Scowls. "Are you."

 

"Do you want me to hurt you?" Hannibal asks. He's genuinely curious--Will has always told him with tongue and teeth and hands curled choking-tight into the collar of Hannibal's shirt. He's never, not once, managed it aloud.

 

"Yes," Will says, low. "I want to hurt you, anyways."

 

It isn't a fight when Will comes at him this time. Not quite. Will bears Hannibal down to the forest floor with a hand knotted tight in his tie, so tight that Hannibal's vision goes grey around the edges. He drops to his knees, then, and Will eases up just a little, lets Hannibal have a few deep, desperate breaths as he shoves him back, straddles him, settles with one knee braced on either side of Hannibal's hips. "Your father," Hannibal rasps once he can see again and reaches up to cup a hand around Will's jaw, thumb pressing sharp into the stripe of new, pink skin. "Didn't he?"

 

"Yeah," Will says and he drops his weight back on the tops of Hannibal's thighs. Hannibal makes a small, dissatisfied sound and Will jerks at the tie once, sharp and warning. "Shut up. Yeah, yeah he did. Kept me on a lead like a dog." 

 

"And you liked it?"

 

Will sneers. "Why?"

 

"We've never discussed it," Hannibal replies, and they haven't. Not for lack of trying on Hannibal's part, but Will bristled every time it came up and eventually Hannibal figured leaving it might be simpler for the both of them.

 

"I have a right to know if you enjoy what I do to you."

 

"No, you don't," Will says. His free hand is busy undoing the buttons below where Hannibal's tie still cuts sharp into his windpipe. He shoves Hannibal's shirt open and rakes his nails slow and dragging over Hannibal's side, digs them deep into the tender skin of Hannibal's hipbone. "You don't have rights here, you don't--my god, do you realize how easy it would be to have you put away? Do you even know what I could _do_ to you? I could ruin everything you've built with one phone call and that doesn't even scare you, does it. You aren't afraid of me. You've given me a loaded gun. You just don't believe I'll ever pull the trigger."

 

Hannibal only smiles. 

 

"What if I did," Will says softly. "What would you do, Doctor Lecter."

 

"I suspect I would go to prison," Hannibal says. "With your injuries, it would be very easy to sell a sexual assault case. A rape kit would easily convict me of malpractice, if nothing else.  My career would be ruined.  And I expect the scrutiny would turn up bodies, eventually." 

 

"And you'd just let me do it," Will hisses and it rolls, summer-warm and sibilant from him. Louisiana-slurred, slick as motor oil.  "All those people you've killed and you'd let me be the one to put you away." 

 

"Yes," Hannibal says, and is only mildly surprised to find it's true. 

 

Will shakes his head. "I don't understand you," he says, but he's sliding a hand between Hannibal's legs anyways, stroking him though the (very likely ruined) wool of his third-favorite suit. Hannibal lets out an appreciative little breath and Will's eyes narrow. He keeps moving, though, keeps pulling lazily at Hannibal's cock as Hannibal shivers and presses up into the touch and doesn't even protest when Will pulls at the tie again as he's unzipping Hannibal's trousers.

 

"Will," Hannibal groans eventually as Will works at him, languid strokes punctuated with a thumb swiped rough over the head, "darling, you're choking me."

 

Will glares down at him but relents his grip just barely. "If I let you up will you run?" He asks as he unbuckles his belt and Hannibal wants to ask for a brief, wild moment where would he _possibly_ want to go when Will was here with a hand at his throat, hard and winded and nudging himself insistently into Hannibal's stomach.

 

Instead, he brackets Will's hips with both hands in the most crushing grip he can, nails biting in deep where denim parts. "Okay," Will allows eventually and lets go long enough to wriggle out of his boots and his jeans, though he doesn't bother with removing the worn flannel still hanging open across his shoulders. The weak sunlight pricks minute needles through the cloth where it skirts around his ribs.  

 

"Do you need," Hannibal starts to ask, but then Will is sinking down on him and he's--he's tight, tense, and he has to spit several times into his hand to help ease the way before he reaches any kind of rhythm. Hannibal arches his head back as Will rocks slow slow _slow_ , achingly so. 

 

" _Oh_ ," Will breathes out and he's ridden Hannibal before, but never like this. Never with Hannibal prone beneath him, never with dirt in his hair and his split lip bleeding sluggish down his chin. Never ground himself down like he's doing now, so pantingly eager to take whatever Hannibal can give. His pupils are blown nearly black, just thin blue skimming around the edges, sick and wide, and he tilts his hips just barely, slants a glare down at Hannibal.

 

"Fuck me," he bites out and then he's got his forearm pressed to Hannibal's throat, he's pressing down heavy into Hannibal's windpipe, and Hannibal does as he asks and does and does and _does_.

 

Of course.

 

He always has.

 

*

 

The next day, Hannibal rises at the break of dawn. He spends ten full minutes staring down at the stripes--dark, mottled purple, scored deep enough to bruise--tracked down Will's back. He cannot make himself feel sorry for it; he cannot make himself feel anything for it.

 

Will is dead asleep. He doesn't flinch when Hannibal skims his fingertips over the marks. 

 

Hannibal doesn't suppose that means anything.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	8. i've grown to love your disappearing act (do one more pretty please)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lemme tell you a story about how I'm the worst.
> 
> uh, basically, I'm real sorry this took so long. it's been a bad few months, but i'm back on a roll now so that should be the last hiatus i hope.
> 
> also, please feel free to point out mistakes--unbeta'd as always, and english is not my first language.
> 
> you're all the best, and thank you so much to every single person who's commented, kudos'd (?) or left any feedback. 
> 
> you can bug me at vstheworld.tumblr.com if u want a lot of dumb stuff on your dash

Of all the conversations they have over the next few weeks—and there are many, Hannibal suddenly as ever-present as he'd been before their break, though he waits for the black eye to fade before he rejoins any company that might ask _questions_ —the worst one is, somehow, not the one where they plot the particulars of his father's murder.

That one's bad, don't get him wrong, leaves him shaken and shaking, because Hannibal says these things so easily, things like _dispose of the body_ and _does he have anyone left who might miss him, Will, we need to be thorough, are you listening to me,_ širdelė, _pay attention._

It’s that last part that gets him, really.

Because he’s thought about this.  He’s thought about this for years, ever since he understood that the nasty set of his father’s jaw lived somewhere in him, too, ever since he first had the urge to grab a handful of Josh’s hair and _twist_ just to see if it might make the boy cry.  He spent a few months getting off to it, even, biting the inside of his cheek bloody and palming himself raggedly, to the bitter pleasure that floods him at the mental Technicolor of his father’s fox-trap hands, splintered and crushed.

(Will has always had a vivid imagination.

His primary school art teachers had loved it, adored him, ruffled their milky soft fingers through his hair like he was a well-behaved puppy. He’d preened at the praise, he remembers with some distant embarrassment, though they hadn’t been able to understand why he gravitated to thick reds and muddy greys, why he finger-painted with such a weird solemnity.

Later, his more creative assignments had resulted in hushed, worried phone calls to his mother and hours spent sipping bad coffee in the guidance councillor’s office as she—couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, fresh-faced and wide-eyed right out of grad school—blinked at him, abruptly gone pale as a ghost, her lipstick a weird, too-bright smear mouthing “H-have you done more than think about it, Will?”

“No,” Will lies to her. “No, it’s—they’re just fantasies. Hallucinations. Jesus, he’d be sick if he knew.”

He smiles as he says it, bared-teeth mocking because Will is smart and Will knows the rules, and as long as he does not pose any real threat, as long as he does not technically exceed the capacity of teen angst she’s expected to handle in any real tangible way, she has no choice but to sit here and _listen to him_ two hours a week. Anything he wants to say—an impossibility, outside the confines of her dim office. There’s some vicious pleasure in spilling himself with an audience of more than his father, though she looks ill more often than not before he’s ever even reached any of the really nasty stuff.

She transfers to a new school the next year, and is replaced with a stern oak stump of a man, who asks Will if he’s considered trying out for the wrestling team as a possible outlet for his increasingly-violent sexual urges.

Will leaves the first session fifteen minutes in, and doesn’t go back.)

It’s nothing new to him, but it’s not as though he’s ever had anyone else to even discuss his adolescent fever dreams with, much less plan them in such excruciating detail. 

Fever dreams that occurred only once he'd gone through the requisite (if brief) sexual education class in fifth grade, of course.  Only after he’d learned that what Daddy did after all the lights went out was something _sick_. Learned it was sick enough that it didn't even get its own cartoon in the video, just a hurried, explanation and a baffling insistence that they tell their parents if an adult touched them anywhere a bathing suit should cover.

For the rest of that day, Will positively burned with shame. 

He hadn't known. He _should_ have known.  He threw up the first time, and the fifth, and the twenty-ninth, and too many times after to bother keeping track. He should have figured it out from that, but sometimes Daddy would just stroke his hair back and close Will in his arms and whisper how precious he was against the damp skin of Will's neck. And...what was he supposed to do with that?

With the lights off, his body a solid and comforting bulk at Will's back, Daddy could allow himself to be tender. Will didn't understand why it took the dead of night and a hand clamped over his mouth, but he ached for it. Didn’t even matter that he felt vaguely ill the whole time, deep roiling nausea like he got after a few hours out on the bay before he rediscovered his sea legs. 

That ache was awful awful _awful_ , lingered with him heavy in his chest and on the back of his tongue, the taste metallic and cloying like lead buckshot for hours after, but he didn't really fight it, on the off chance Daddy might stay.

Daddy told him it was normal, the single time he’d found his voice—weak, shuddering scrap of a thing, choked, _pathetic_ —long enough to ask why.  He’d told Will it was nothing to fret over, something everyone did, something normal, but he said it the exact same way he told Momma he'd only stopped in for one drink at the bar after work, still stinking of cigarettes and cheap bourbon. 

(Will may be stupid, but he ain't _dumb_.)

He stared his momma down over dinner that night—fried crawfish that left his fingers shiny with oil and his stomach knotted up nastily, tasting of nothing but clay in his mouth, wet, gritty—and thought viciously _why didn't you tell me, why didn't you let me know what he does is ruining me._

The clear liquid in Momma's glass was far too thick to be water,  way it was most every day back then. She didn’t even look at him, didn't ask how his day was, or how his tryout for the soccer team had gone or where the bright purple marks wrapped around his forearms came from, _honey, you gotta be more careful,_ and this wasn’t exactly anything new. He wanted to shake her, though, and that was new, wanted with a furious, blistering clarity to grab her shoulders and scream into her numb, slack face _you’re supposed to take me and run, you’re supposed to stop this, you’re supposed to take care of me._  

He wanted to scream himself raw, loud enough that she’d do anything aside from blink muzzily at him and whisper _Mommy’s tired, baby, not now._  

(He wanted in that moment for maybe the first time since he’d stumbled across his father on the wrong side of a handle of Jim Beam, actually wanted something more tangible than an answer to his vague plea of _please let all this just stop._  He didn't have words for it until much later, didn’t know what name to assign the nameless maelstrom raging in him. He didn't understand what agency means in any real sense until he’s well past undergrad, but it hit him hard in that moment anyways, brutal as a boot to the stomach. 

His mother didn't seem to notice.) 

Instead, she chain-smoked as Will ate, and eventually some combination of the secondhand smoke, the gnawing in the pit of his belly and the crushing clench of his lungs had him lightheaded enough to offer, “We learned about sex today in school."

(This is a habit he will whittle into a fine point over the next ten years, a masochistic delight in provoking arguments he has no hope of winning. He will bristle at Hannibal and snap and they will circle each other, wary, though they both know it will end with Will on the ground. 

Which is exactly what he's been after all along, so.)

There followed a beat of blank, horrible silence. His father stopped chewing. Momma’s cigarette paused halfway to her mouth, frozen but for the smoke curling in lazy blue spirals to the ceiling. Will watched them blossom apart against the yellowed ceiling, so that he didn't have to meet her pale eyes. "Did you," she said finally, and she sounded dazed, like she’d been walking two days with a head wound. Absent. High, he will only understand later.

Will gritted his teeth hard enough to hear them creak warningly in the cavern of his skull. "Yup. Learned all about condoms, and AIDS." 

Daddy made a deep, disapproving noise at that.  Will may not have understood the concept of hypocrisy at that point, but he knew there was something strange in him hating men who prefer other men, when he spent his nights warming his son's bed exponentially more than his wife's. He barreled on, though, before Daddy had a chance to expand on that point. “They taught us about _no means no._ Ever heard of that one, Momma?”

His mother recoiled like he’d slapped her, glass dropping to the table with a heavy _chunk_. Will’s jaw snapped shut and he was abruptly dizzy, his white-knuckled hold on the kitchen table the only thing keeping him from wavering against the sudden engine-roar of adrenaline. He knew better, didn’t he, he _knew better_ , and just because he was expecting the blow to the back of his head don't mean it don't hurt him still. He felt a weal rise where Daddy's wedding band landed and he smiled tight at that, teeth bared down at his plate. 

His pulse pounded kick-drum insistent in his ears, so screamingly loud he couldn’t even make out half of Daddy’s predictable _waste of space, you little maggot, how dare you talk like that to your momma, how dare you._  

He wanted to howl. He wanted to strike out at her just to shake out some kind of reaction, wanted to throw himself at Daddy and kick and bite and mark him up with every pitiful ounce of his strength, so that everyone could see, even if Daddy knocked him seven ways to Sunday for it.  

Wouldn’t matter, really, if he did; Will was a dull and slow thing to begin with, eternally staring at his own feet instead of other people. He was patently useless at most subjects, absentminded and forever forgetting even his simple elementary assignments, weak and stupid and too small to do much of anything. He couldn’t hold his own against his father.  Had no hope of winning the fight he was trying to provoke.  He knew that, sure, but in that moment—for the first time in his short, hateful life—he also didn’t _care_.

(Will knows he was malnourished as a child, knows the round, tight swell of his belly did not mean he was well-fed the way Momma thought it did. He knows the ever-present tremor in his right hand, and the fact that he doesn't quite clear six feet aren't his fault, but he still feels his cheeks go hot every time Hannibal leans over him to retrieve something from a shelf Will can't reach.)

"Yeah?" Daddy's voice rumbled, thick and deadly-low.  All Will could manage was _the good lord speaks like rolling thunder_ looped round and round on stuttering repeat in his head as a large hand closed around the back of his neck. Squeezed, warning.

He wondered, not for the first time, if Daddy could snap his neck easy as he's seen stray cats in the yard snap the necks of the slower rats. Wondered if it would hurt too much.

“Yeah,” Will snarled and Daddy’s grip slipped around to his throat and after that, Will couldn’t keep track of much of anything at all

(He remembers the broken-glass clink of ice in the kitchen as Momma poured herself another drink.

That, he recalls with upsetting clarity.)

 

*

 

“When you say everyone knew,” Hannibal says over dinner one night—a flaky white fish in a delicate citrus sauce, because sometimes Will cannot stomach Hannibal and red meat together at the same time and Hannibal has fortunately taken that as challenge rather than insult—“What would you qualify as ‘everyone?’”

Will blinks. “Uh.  Neighbors? A few teachers? My mom’s priest, probably, she told him everything. Why?” 

Hannibal has, these wrenching few weeks since they’d abandoned even a pretense of Will’s sessions, developed a really nasty habit of tossing him barbed questions when Will’s least expecting it.  He knows, okay, he _knows_ Hannibal does it to startle a reaction from him, but it’s a fresh wave of nausea he doesn’t need and he’s already chewing aspirin like candy—what more does the man want?

He is complying.  He is quiet.  He does not protest when Hannibal says things like _when we kill your father_ like it’s a foregone conclusion, even though it rocks him to the very core, and he cannot figure out what more Hannibal is expecting of him. “Some might see that as motive,” Hannibal offers.

Will frowns.  “That _is_ the motive, Hannibal.”  He drums the fingers of his free hand against the tense line of his thigh, a staccato _taptaptap_ that does exactly nothing for the involuntary way his hand tightens around his fork.  

He could drive it into the thick slope of Hannibal’s throat easily, bared as it is by the low collar of his (borrowed) t-shirt. He could run. Will is good at running. He could make it a decent ways, probably, before Hannibal managed to staunch the bleeding enough to pursue him.

Will’s eyes snag on the sharp line of Hannibal’s collarbone, though, and then again on the gentle upward turn of his mouth when he catches Will staring.  “You wouldn’t bother with him otherwise,” Will says softly.

He can see Hannibal watching him even as Will turns his attention back to the meal, face open and curious, hungry, as though Will is still somehow a fascinating subject even after all these months.  “Wouldn’t I?” he asks, mild.  

Will snorts out a laugh. “You don’t exactly strike me as the vigilante type,” is all he says on the matter, and Hannibal blessedly drops it.

Exactly one week later, he finds it in the pocket of his favorite canvas jacket as he’s rooting around for his house keys.  The newspaper is clipped in a neat rectangle he’d never have bothered with himself, folded in two with military precision.  He has to read it three times to even recognize the man in the picture—why would that face be familiar to him, after all, it’s been nearly thirty years since he was last forced to attend Sunday mass with his mother—and when he does, he is abruptly sick into the bushes nestled next to his front porch.

 _Beloved by his parish_ , the obituary reads, and though it politely does not mention the grisly mechanics of Father Moore’s demise, it’s easy enough for Will to guess.  He smooths the ragged edge of one bitten fingernail over the tiny, grainy portrait. His hand is shaking. _He_ is shaking.

The case will never be associated with the Ripper. Will knows firsthand how horrifyingly careful Hannibal is, and he's willing to bet even the homicide detectives investigating the case will never so much as realize a serial killer was involved.  No theatrics for the good father, none of the elegant death masks he’s come to associate with Hannibal’s work, because this was not a Ripper killing at all. There is no visceral joy in the quiet death of an old man. This was only an elimination of a potential problem.  Preparation. Caution.  Hannibal didn’t even enjoy this one.

 _I'm changing his M.O._ , Will realizes as he stares down at the clipping. His brain works at the idea, sluggish and unwilling, because Hannibal is a force of nature and Will is...

_I'm changing him._

In Hannibal’s neat, precise script, just under the black-and-white photo of Father Moore, is written something that Google translates loosely into _God gave teeth; God will provide the bread._

 

*

 

Hannibal sleeps like the dead.  

It should be unsettling, the pale stillness of him when Will has become so intimately used to his constant motion, the cool cast to his skin, the fact that he stays firmly planted on his back the whole night through, hands bridged loose over his stomach.

Often, he blinks easy awake and rolls onto his side to smile at Will, a warm, easy curl of his mouth that just crinkles at the corner of his eyes. He looks pleased in those moments, as though he had, still, wholly expected to find that Will had fled in the night.

(It's so starkly unlike Will's dragging, desperate gasps for air as he fights to surface from his nightmares.

He should have abandoned the bed out of courtesy, probably, because more than once he's woken up to firm hands around his biceps and a sleep-roughened, "Your name is Will Graham. You are in Wolf Trap, Virginia. It is three forty-eight in the morning and you are safe," mouthed into the thin skin of his jaw.

Will is a greedy thing, though. He never quite manages to pry himself from the bed once Hannibal's breathing has evened and slowed.) 

When Will's phone rings in the dead of night not three weeks into their tentative reconciliation, Hannibal does not wake up.

Will, startled from a vague, drifting half-dream of riding a horse through the empty alleys of Baltimore, stabs, panicked, at the "silence" button the moment it begins to vibrate in his hand. 

 _Louisiana_ , the caller ID reads, and he is suddenly, horribly awake, his entire world skidding abrupt to the side a few degrees, heart making its best effort to climb into the back of his throat. He realizes he is holding his breath only when the screen dims and his phone chimes a friendly "one missed voicemail" alert.

He deletes it. Tries desperately not to think about it every time his phone buzzes in his pocket for three days after.

Hannibal never stirs.

 

*

 

A week passes before his father tries again.  Then two.  Then four and a half.  

Will stops bringing his phone to bed entirely. He can’t say he keeps track after that, really—he just deletes the voicemails as they slowly peter off, eventually trickling to a stop. 

Same thing he did the last time. He doesn’t think much of them. He can't think much of them. 

Will is good at running.

(He should. He really, really should.)

 

*

 

When it happens, finally, Will is—for someone coiled as tightly-wound as he is, waiting for the other shoe to drop for the better part of the last two decades—embarrassingly caught off-guard.

It's been weeks of nothing, of less than nothing, of complete radio silence from the dusty little cabin he left behind in Louisiana, as he and Hannibal paced and bristled and learned to fit around each other again. And that was—fine, actually. As fine as it could be. Relatively speaking.

(Just above the crisp white collar of Hannibal's shirt, Will can still see the purpled echoes of where his hand had slotted so nearly around Hannibal's throat the night before.

Hannibal had not made a single sound of protest, though he'd had no warning. He'd tipped his head back for easier access, which made something hot and feral flare in Will's gut, his grip suddenly vise-tight around the erratic thrum of Hannibal's pulse as the man gasped shallowly and never let those blood-dark eyes waver from Will's. Challenging, even flat on his back and exposed, the easy calm of a predator who knows he has the inevitable upper hand. Like Will could never register on Hannibal's radar as a threat, no matter how many bruises he sucks into that smug skin, how many times he splits it open with his teeth.

It made Will furious. It still does.

He didn't even bother to fight.)

He'd managed to put the calls out of his mind, mostly, but—of course it would be _now_ , of all times, as Hannibal’s got an arm slung  around his chest and three fingers shoved slick up into him, as Will pants a ragged beat against the fogged glass of his living room window, as he squirms desperate back against Hannibal’s unyielding weight. It's crushing him into the sharp edge of the windowsill, burning these dull, aching stripes over the bunched muscles of his thighs as Will groans, pleads, “Harder, harder, come on  Hannibal, I want to, I want—“  

— _that_ , of course, is when his father chooses to call.

Of course.

The chirp of his ringtone makes Hannibal (and Winston, where he’s paused in the kitchen doorway) both cock their heads in a weirdly similar manner. Will can’t bring himself to laugh as he twists around to watch the fine narrowing of Hannibal's eyes, watch as he processes who might be trying to get ahold of Will before sunrise and clearly doesn’t come up with an answer he likes.  

No one calls Will, not really, not unless it's Jack with another nightmare he needs wrangled. He must look particularly disheveled these days, because even those calls have been few and far between. Alana and Beverly both prefer to text. Will’s contact list aside from his coworkers is embarrassingly short.

Hannibal's eyes fall to the tiny screen of his phone next to them on the hardwood floor and track once, twice, a third dragging time over the word _Daddy_.

Ah.

For a handful of moments, Will can't actually breathe, lungs empty as if he'd had the air punched out of him.

He can't even remember how he has that number saved, much less under that name—he might have done it one night drunk and fucked out of his mind, but his jaw's locked tight as his memory right now and it's not like an explanation would make this moment any better. There’s something thumping thick and dully terrified in his throat as Hannibal bends down and—with three fingers still buried to the hilt inside Will, and no apparent regard for the way the motion makes him squirm, makes him hiss—picks up the phone.

He studies it for a moment, before extending it to Will. His thumb slides smooth over the 'answer' button without so much as an inquisitive noise in Will’s direction.  He presses the phone to Will’s ear, and his lips to the slope of Will’s shoulder blade.  He does not speak.

“He—hello?" Will manages. He can barely see Hannibal’s face over his shoulder, but he can feel his mouth quirk meanly at the corner, the barest hint of sharp teeth pressing into Will’s skin. 

"Willy?" The minute wrinkle between Hannibal's eyebrows blossoms into a full-blown frown. All Will thinks for a brief, frantic moment is _can he hear that?_

Hannibal’s wrist _moves_ then, tears a low groan from the back of Will’s throat while Will bites down on his tongue, just hard enough to keep it locked silent behind his teeth.  His traitorous hips hitch up, bucking helplessly into empty air, Will whining under his breath as Hannibal begins, cruelly, shallowly, and _so goddamn slowly_ to fuck him down onto those broad fingers.  

Will means to cry out something that might have been Hannibal’s name, but Hannibal’s got him by the jaw before he makes so much as a sound, palm flat and stifling against his mouth. “ _Shhh_ ,” Hannibal whispers, and taps the phone with his thumb where it's hooked under Will's jaw, as though Will could possibly forget who he’s talking to, as though he could pay attention to anything more than the steady drag of Hannibal's fingers inside him and the familiar husk of Daddy's wrecked whiskey voice in his ear.

Will nods, jerky and uneven. Hannibal’s hand drops from Will’s face with a last meaningful squeeze of his fingertips. It’s very nearly gentle.

They don’t _do_ this.  They don’t do—Hannibal doesn’t take him apart like this, hasn’t ever worked him soft-slick and open and pleading with each cat arch of his back.  He doesn’t graze a thumb slow down the tight pull of skin just behind Will's balls, doesn’t curl his fingers deep into the spot inside Will that makes his head snap back, so deep that his vision pricks white-and-black at the edges. They aren’t—they’re clenched teeth and split knuckles, they’re raw sinew and exposed tendons and twitching, snarled nerve endings. Hannibal holds him down, holds him together, pins him like a bug to cardboard and keeps all of Will from shaking to pieces with the red lines of his nails on Will's flanks, the necklace of bruising he bites into Will's chest. Hannibal tears him to pieces on a daily basis, but he does not ever tenderly deconstruct Will, as though Will is something he intends to put back together when he's through.

(“ _Kintsugi_ ,” Hannibal says once, tracing the broad stripe of an old scar down Will’s back. He assumes that’s the line Hannibal is following, anyways, one of three silvery belt-marks that had never quite faded right, the one that—if he’s gauging properly, where Hannibal presses into the ropy muscle bracketing his spine—terminates in a knotted scar on the back of Will’s left arm where the buckle had struck. It doesn’t feel pleasant, that ragged seam where his back had knit itself back together, but Hannibal examines it as though it was fine embroidery, deliberate in each minute detail.

Will, still panting, still fucked-out and half asleep and prickling now where Hannibal’s fingers skim overheated skin, mumbles “Huh?”

“It’s a Japanese method of pottery,” Hannibal says, because of _course_ he’s thinking about Japanese pottery three minutes after he’d bit the back of Will’s neck and come inside him. The fingers stop, spread flat against his back, a warm weight that Will can’t quite muster the energy to press into. He amends, “Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a method of repair. Broken pieces are mended together using a lacquer mixed with gold. It is considered more lovely for the imperfection.”

Will closes his eyes.)

This doesn’t hurt at all, though it sets his stomach to twisting in on itself, and Will doesn’t get it.

He doesn't understand, but here Hannibal is anyways, muttering a soft chorus of “Good, that’s good, William, hush now—you don’t want him to hear, do you? There’s a good boy—“ against the back of Will’s neck, sweet as a prayer. His free hand smooths, tender, around the jut of Will’s hip and that’s the part Will can’t quite process. Hannibal does not touch him kindly anymore—outside of these brief collisions, he doesn’t touch Will at all. 

Will curls his own fingers tight over the receiver. He tries to remember how to breathe.

“Will?  Are you there?”  

“Answer him,” Hannibal murmurs. He presses his tongue flat to the notches of Will’s vertebrae, slides a blistering trail down the arc of Will’s spine between his shoulder blades, over the dip at the small of his back.  He takes his time with it, like it isn’t taking all of Will’s strength just to keep himself upright, never mind carrying on a conversation, and follows tongue with teeth over the bony crest of Will’s hip. He sucks wet, languid at the mark he leaves, like he’s—like he’s _tasting_ Will. He probably is.  

“William.   _Answer him_.”

“I’m here,” Will breathes, and  “I—yeah, dad, I’m— _ah_ —I’m here.” Will leans his forehead against the glass, presses hard to the cool surface of the window, as though it might provide counterpoint to the way Hannibal licks at that mark, sets a a slow pull of heat in the pit of Will’s belly, black and rolling.

Hannibal actually laughs at that, this low, venomous thing and the warm huff of resulting breath against him is enough to wring from Will a tiny, strangled noise that he will assure himself later is mostly not a whimper.

“I miss you,” his father says.  

Will means to hang up at that. He does. He means to drop the phone, means to snap that his father had lost any right he’d ever had to even think about Will, much less have the nerve to miss him, except then Hannibal is nudging his legs further apart and Will nearly bites through his cheek as a warm, slippery thing flicks, curious, into where he’s stretched too tight around the blunt width of Hannibal’s fingers. The thing—the tongue, _Hannibal’s_ tongue, the man was a doctor, shouldn’t he know better?—fucks shallowly, maddeningly into him and Will stabs the “mute” button instead, drops his head, _keens_.

“I—I’d like to see you again, Willy. It’s been—twenty years is too long, son.  I want to sort things out.” Tinny, barely audible through the tiny microphone now that it’s not pressed to his ear. “Please,” his father says.

“What,” Will manages dazedly, pants, “what are you, what are you _doing_ —”

“Hush,” Hannibal admonishes. “Tell him you want to see him. Tell him you miss him.”

“I don’t—“

There comes a sharp _crack_ as the flat of a wide hand meets Will’s flank and Will jerks, startled at the bright blossom of pain. Doesn’t even try to move away. Just breathes, a hot, ragged pant of “ _Hannibal, yes._ ”

Hannibal chuckles and hits him again, harder this time, and Will’s voice is somehow blessedly steady as he un-mutes the phone, says,

“When can I see you?”


	9. thought that you were joking when you said you couldn't breathe--turns out that you were choking on a town you couldn't leave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so a serious thanks to every single one of you who didn't abandon me during my, like, seven month hiatus. i can't believe i've got such sweet people reading this, much less actually asking for more.
> 
> and a real special shout-out to Maharetchan, who sent me an extremely nice tumblr message. 
> 
> y'all keep this trash party going.
> 
> this chapter: hannibal navel-gazes and is bad at feelings. will is messy. 
> 
> next chapter: actual plot, probably i hope

 

Hannibal and Will practice.

There’s no better word for it, really.  Though Hannibal has a wealth of experience by this point, though he could bring a man down practically in his sleep, hunting with Will—hunting with anyone, running _alongside_ instead of _in pursuit of_ —is an entirely divorced process.

Hannibal isn’t sure precisely what he expected. Will has always been so very excellent at camouflage, at hiding the raw _other_ ness of himself beneath layers of outsized flannel and his blunt, self-deprecating humor. It’s charming and frustrating in equal measure. Because he still does it to _Hannibal_ of all people, because he still insists on pulling his human skin over the sharp, lovely angles of the creature beneath, Hannibal takes a deliberate pleasure in the guttural cries he wrings from Will on a nightly basis.

Those, at least, are honest.

Will is not a large man by any means. Hannibal is half a head taller, twice as broad, more imposing based on sheer size alone, though he isn’t sure that has anything to do with the way Will defers to him. He thinks, sometimes, from the stricken look on the younger man’s face, from the way his eyes have an odd tendency to drag a good ten inches upwards of the top of Hannibal’s head, that Will’s sweet, fevered mind must occasionally show him something else. Something frightening, if the acrid [familiar, now] tang of panic mingled with his usual bouquet of whiskey and mildly unwashed dog is anything to go by.

He does not ask what it is that Will sees. He is certain that he would not want to know.

Will defers to him no matter where he’s looking, though. He is stubborn and prickly to his coworkers on his best days, impossible on his worst, but there is a jarring absence of fight in him where Hannibal is concerned. He has these brief moments, sometimes, where he’ll clench his jaw and draw himself up to his full height as though he is almost steeling himself to protest, to argue, to offer any opinion that Hannibal has not already vocalized, and in those precious heartbeats he looks like the dogged, furious thing that had first sparked Hannibal’s interest.

Always, though, he catches himself. Always, he deflates before Hannibal’s eyes. Always, he rounds his shoulders and stares at his feet and acts as though Hannibal has bared his teeth and cowed him into submission, although Hannibal has never raised a hand to the man outside of what he pleads for.

When they hunt, however, it’s a completely different story. Will carries himself like a back-alley brawler, head down, hungry, like he’s bursting at the seams, itching for the fight. Like this, he is hair-trigger, brutal and lovely. Like this, he is unpredictable. There’s a tension to it that Hannibal recognizes, a pull to the taut lines of his back that Hannibal knows intimately because he’s seen it dozens of times deconstructed across his own sheets. When Hannibal tries to clasp a comforting hand across the back of Will’s neck, Will snarls wordless at him and jerks away.

He positively _thrills_ at the slam of his body into the bulk of his prey. Smiles, wide and vicious, as Mr. Edward McDonough reels back from the blow Will swings into his jaw, as Mr. Edward McDonough drops his cheap leather briefcase to the cement, staggers and sputters “Who the living _fuck_ —?”

Will doesn’t seem to hear him. Will doesn’t seem to hear anything. He swings, desperate, again again _again_ into the fleshy moon of the man’s face until there is a low crack and an abrupt torrent of blood from a broken nose. He brings their quarry down with brutal efficiency then, an elbow hooked around his throat, the full of Will’s weight borne dogged on the man’s back. His other hand takes a crushing hold of McDonough’s face, fingers spidered around the scruffy angles of his jaw, palm flat and heavy over his mouth.

McDonough doesn't scream. He doesn't have time. 

[Later that evening, Hannibal realizes that he'd fully expected Will to pause. He'd expected hesitance, if not outright defiance, expected Will to drop those wounded doe eyes to the scuffed toes of his shoes and mumble something along the lines of _I can't, Hannibal, I can’t_ —

He had, frankly, expected to step in. He had expected Will to need his help. To need him.

Will doesn’t.]

Will’s very first victim is middle-aged, wearing a ragged half of a department-store suit, a decade older than Will and easily has a good twenty pounds on him. Will’s very first victim has a picture of his wife and his six-year-old daughter in his wallet, both smiling the same wide, gaptoothed smile and squinting into the sun. His daughter is wearing a pink flowered bathing suit and waving a dripping red wedge of watermelon in her fist. His wife is pale and pretty.  Will’s very first victim has a mortgage and a teenage son from a previous marriage and Will knows all of this, because Hannibal told him already, but it doesn't stop his prey from reciting it again and again, in exhausting, blubbering detail, as though they are still at the point where Will might simply _change his mind_.

"So I'm clear," Will snaps finally, only twenty-three minutes after the man had first stirred awake and begun to sob in earnest, "you think I should let you live for—for what, your kids?" He drops to his haunches in front of the man and takes his jaw in hand again, wrenches his head upwards. Forces McDonough to look at him. “Just because you managed to squeeze out a few offspring—which, congratulations on that by the way, managing something that nearly _every man on earth_ is capable of—you think that means you deserve some kind of special consideration? You think that makes you, what, makes you _exempt_?”

McDonough cringes back. “I—I don’t—“

“I know you don’t,” Will spits. “I know you don’t, and here’s _how_ I know.”

Will’s very first victim also has some extremely damning pictures of said daughter in a folder on his computer’s hard drive. Will doesn’t need to see more than the first shot in the album, a decidedly nonsexual close-up of the girl’s teary eyes, her gaping, frightened mouth. Will very calmly closes the laptop, rolls his neck to the side with an audible _pop_ and turns on the man. "A baby," he says. And then, almost gently, ”You brought this on yourself, you know. She’ll be so much better off without you.”

One picture is all it takes and Will’s first victim gets slit throat to cock and heaved upright into a sitting position, innards slipping wet-dark from the open pit of his belly. McDonough goes clammy and cold in a matter of moments, shaking with the first throes of shock, but aware enough to make a horrible, gurgling kind of sound as Will grabs a double handful of intestine and twists. Hannibal doubts he can feel any pain, but still—it cannot be a pleasant sensation.

“Will,” Hannibal admonishes and Will blinks up at him, pale coils of his prey’s intestines wound cat’s-cradle between his fingers. Will has the nerve to bare his teeth at Hannibal and pull again, viciously, defiant. Beneath the sprawl of Will’s thighs, bracketed between Will’s splayed knees where he’s crawled nearly into his prey’s cut-open lap, the man gives a final, wet gasp and goes limp.

Will’s first victim dies slowly in a mess of his own intestines on the filthy concrete floor of a storage unit and when it is done, when McDonough’s heart has thudded at last to a panicked stop, Will looks up at him, wild-eyed, grinning.

“Congratulations,” Hannibal says. It sticks thickly to the back of his teeth and he does not mean it in the slightest. He thinks Will might be able to tell. “You handled that well.”

“You’re manipulating me,” Will replies. Jerks his head towards the computer and does not let his gaze drop from Hannibal’s. He’s still smiling. It very nearly looks fond. “You’re giving me a _cause_ , Hannibal. I don’t—I don’t need training wheels for this. Do you still trust me so goddamn little?”

_No,_ Hannibal wants to tell him. Will is drenched in the wet shine of blood from collarbone to knees, skin streaky and dripping near-black with it in the dim light of the storage unit, but Hannibal can see that he is hard, regardless. He is panting, slicked with sweat that did not come from wrestling McDonough to the ground and he smells like—

_You misunderstand_ , he wants to say, wants to soothe the grim lines from between Will’s brows, wants to slide a gentle hand across his shoulders. _I want only to_ —

He doesn’t know how to finish it. Hannibal is not used to _wanting_ without _taking_.

He says nothing.

Over the prone body of his prey—bleeding sluggish and slow still from a particularly nasty head wound, bound at the wrists and ankles with cheap plastic zip ties—Will pushes to his feet, steps close to Hannibal, tugs sharply at the knot of his tie until it slips from its immaculate Windsor.  He crowds into the curve of Hannibal’s chest, tilts his head up for a kiss as though he couldn’t possibly expect any other outcome.  He bites at Hannibal’s lower lip when he complies, smiles, bites down hard, twists his head vicious away, like he fully intends to draw blood.

[For the stuff already spattered across Will’s face, Hannibal cannot be sure if he does or not.]

“Show me, Hannibal,” Will husks out, dropping his attention, his mouth, hot to the curve of Hannibal’s shoulder. He tugs insistent at Hannibal’s shirttails and pulls them free, ruining the cotton with congealing smears of red in the process. His hands shake only as he fumbles with Hannibal’s belt, as he wrests the button of his trousers open and coaxes the zipper down. Hannibal doesn’t move to stop him. “Please,” Will murmurs, “Show me how you keep them alive so they _feel_ it.”

He is missing the point entirely. Moreover, he knows that he is missing the point entirely. Will knows intimately what Hannibal wants of his victims, knows they are nothing more than base material. The artist does not apologize to his paint for emptying the tube. He does not think anything of wringing the last drop from crumpled aluminum, does not consider the possibility that the paint was content inside its packaging. It isn’t about them feeling anything.

It is, in fact, not really about _them_.

“What is this to you,” Hannibal murmurs. Will freezes with his left hand shoved down the front of Hannibal’s trousers. “What am I helping you achieve, Will?”

“You wanted me to be a hunter,” Will sneers and now, his eyes skitter off to the left, coming to rest somewhere over Hannibal’s shoulder. Now, he pulls away and from experience, Hannibal knows that he will not look directly at Hannibal for days afterward. “You want me to be a hunter, so let me _hunt_.”

 

 

*

 

 

Strictly speaking, McDonough is Will’s second kill, but Hannibal has never truly counted Hobbes as a victim. Hobbes was…self-defense, perhaps. Hobbes was survival. Will took no pleasure in the man’s life pulsing out warm between his fingers. He did not thrill at the shuddery ebbing of Hobbes’ heart. He barely noticed it, actually, focused as he was on the smile carved through Abigail’s slit throat and only his own bare hands to hold her together.

She would have died, if not for him. She would have spent herself on that cold tile floor alongside her daddy, bled out into the slick already staining Will’s hands and knees, had he not taken her by the neck and hissed _hold on, you’re alright, just hold on_ and then _he’d_ held on and she’d somehow made it through the night.

[Hobbes’ death does not become him—moreover, Will does not become anything but shivering and horrified over it. He burns with guilt, flays himself via his night terrors and the way he will not look at his gun before he tucks it into the small of his back. He wrenches himself positively sick over it.

In retrospect, Hannibal thinks it is more for Abigail’s sake than his own. He wants so much to replace her father solely because he took her father away. Equivalent exchange. He would do the same for the offspring of a stray dog he’d run over with his car—it is not any guilt over the death itself, no real value ascribed to the life he’d taken, only for the young, miserable slip of a girl left behind.

Pragmatic. Practical.]

“I owe him my life,” Abigail tells him from her hospital bed the very first time he visits, determined to find what it is in this girl—starkly, sickly white, dark-eyed and dark-haired, not especially pretty—that Will gravitates to. She does not so much as look at him, her eyes trained instead on the muted television. It’s an infomercial for a tragic piece of turquoise jewelry, a bracelet, shaped like an alligator, that he cannot picture her wearing. She is much calmer than one would expect, from a young woman who’s just found out her pillows were stuffed with the shorn hair of her father’s victims. “I owe him _everything_.”

“Will Graham?” Hannibal asks, taking a seat uninvited on the edge of her bed. She shifts pointedly away from him, one knobby knee drawing up to her chest. He smiles. “Or your father?”

“I _owe_ him,” she repeats, but her thumbs slips absent over the bandage wound around her throat. She hasn’t bothered covering it for his visit, though Alana had told him she’d never seen the girl without a scarf. Three of them are knotted, in fact, around the metal railing of her bed, immediately to her right, easily within her reach, but for him, she has not taken pains to hide anything at all. He thinks he could like that about her. “And hey, I told them I didn’t want a shrink,” she adds, scowling, “but thanks for playing anyways.”

And then—

The stubborn twitch to her mouth, the way she squares her shoulders as she says it, the way her hands curl into fists instead of clutching white-knuckled and scared at the hospital comforter draped across her lap, she may as well have spit at him _I don’t need you, I don’t need him, I don’t need anyone._ She is not frightened. She is furious.

_Ah_ , Hannibal thinks.

 

 

*

 

 

Will had not said a word, as he’d let Abigail’s cold hand slip from his, as he’d allowed her to disappear into the fluorescent maw of a nearby ambulance. He had not looked pleased with the life he had saved. He had not done much more than shiver under the emergency blanket a kind EMT had draped over his shoulders, and blink owlishly at Jack’s barrage of _what happened, where was your backup, Will, why didn’t you wait, why wouldn’t you wait until it was safe?_

Predictably, he didn’t answer. “It’s not your fault,” Jack remembered to offer roughly after a few minutes of watching Will stare blank at his own feet. Will laughed at that, a bright, jagged thing, though his expression did not change.

“You can’t be serious,” he said. Hannibal recalls a bright swatch of Abigail’s blood smeared all down the left crest of Will’s cheekbone, bold as war-paint, where he must have dragged an unconscious hand over his face. He made no move to wipe it away, no indication that he’d even remembered it was there, which had pleased Hannibal.

Then he crumpled, abruptly, to vomit on Hobbes’ front lawn, which had _not_.

Jack made no move to help him up. “Come on,” he said instead, grudgingly, as Will retched, heaved, spit into the grass. “Job’s not done. Pull yourself together, Will.”

It took him several shivering minutes to get to his feet, half a minute more to spit the taste onto the driveway but somehow—through sheer force of will, through his own bullheaded stubbornness—he did. He got to his feet and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and if he was deadpan as he delivered his report to Jack, if he did not ever quite look Jack in the face, he still stayed standing.

[The important thing to realize here is that it is _different_ , what Hannibal asks of him. He is not Jack. He does not want Will to rifle around in the mind of strangers, to leech out the poison from the monsters they pursue in an effort to better the beasts at their own game.

He doesn’t care about other monsters. He doesn’t care about winning.

He doesn’t care about anything, truly, except that he and Will Graham both continue to draw breath.

And _that’s_ new, isn’t it.]

 

 

*

 

 

Will takes to each new addiction with a manic eagerness, like a retriever to water—the whiskey, the cigarettes, the withdrawal shake of his hands and the carved-out hollows of his wrists, all once neatly notated in Hannibal’s spidery script and easily recalled, despite the fact that his notes on Will Graham had been set ablaze in the fireplace not long after he’d first taken Will to bed.

[That is far too polite a term for what it had been, perhaps. They had not made it out of the study, much less to bed, and he had stared, for days after, at the muddled blossom of bruising beneath Will’s cheap cotton shirts. At the red stripes across the heels of Will’s hands, where the rug had rubbed them raw. At the purple line smudged just behind his ear, nearly hidden beneath the dark fall of his hair, tucked around the angle of his jaw where Hannibal had hooked a thumb, forced his jaw slack, held his mouth open and—

Hannibal does not bruise. He does not mark. He does not lay claim any more than is necessary—what artist, after all, signs his name so bold across a piece that it detracts from the creation itself? He has never seen his work walking around on a living, breathing canvas before and so he does not know it is something he even has the capacity to adore until he sees the shape of his moth stretched long-toothed, animal and distorted, blistered along the white line of Will’s flank.

He will find, later, (after a somewhat self-indulgent period of examination) that it is not really the base physical collision that he enjoys—it is instead the way Will sinks to the floor at Hannibal’s feet, as though he never plans to get up again. It is the way his eyelids drop languid to half-mast, the way he presses into Hannibal’s fingers carding through his hair, the way he rolls his head to the side and exposes the pale expanse of his bare throat. In those moments he looks so grateful, so very relieved to unburden himself for those handfuls of minutes, to be abruptly, completely grounded alone in his own head.

Hannibal thinks of nothing but the slow, liquid smile Will gives him after, the gentle rasp of his breathing against Hannibal’s skin as he drifts into uneasy sleep.

That almost makes it bearable.]

Will had been reluctant at the beginning, before he’d learned exactly what he could demand of Hannibal. He’d been hesitant. Demure. Ducked his head down and hid behind his shaggy bangs, made stubborn eye contact only with the tops of Hannibal's socked feet. He had said little and moved less, opting to instead watch Hannibal when he thought he wasn't being watched back, stare at him wide-eyed, pupils empty and near-black which— 

[He looks so terribly much like she had in these moments. 

Hannibal knows this is impossible. He knows Will shares nothing at all with his poor, dead sister except for the misfortune of stirring something darkly fond and possessive in him. They do not look alike—Mischa had been pale and pointed, all wolfish Anglo slopes like Hannibal himself, where Will is dark, unkempt, rangy as a wild dog. 

Moreover, he doesn’t _want_ to see the parallel there. He very firmly refuses to touch the connection his mind insists on stitching between the two. He never speaks her name, not once, not to Bedelia, not to himself and _certainly_ never to Will, but he pushes Will face first into his own pillows sometimes, just so he doesn’t have to meet the blank, adoring expanse of his blown pupils.] 

At first, Will had been pathetically grateful for any scrap of vicious attention Hannibal deigned to give him. The snarl of fingers in his hair made him moan, those same fingers pressed sharp between his piano-key ribs had him panting and pushing back into Hannibal, eager, insistent. Hannibal is permitted to slam him into any available surface with no real warning, to climb atop him and rut like a beast, to split open the skin of Will's back with his teeth as though Will is his freshly-downed prey, and receive only a grateful sob in return. 

[“Tell me about Will Graham,” Bedelia says, every single time since he’d first mentioned the man’s name, pen tapping at the plush of a delicately-lined bottom lip. She is wearing a dark slash of color today, a deep, cruel cranberry to match her dress, hair pinned carefully away from the elegant lines of her bare shoulders, the long, equine arch of her neck. He stares evenly at the slow thrum of her pulse. He does not tell her about Will Graham. He does not need to. She knows.

“Tell me what he makes you _feel_ ,” she says with a lopsided twist of a smile and a deep, distinctly undignified drag of her wine. She does not ask how he makes Hannibal feel, because she knows Hannibal cannot hope to answer. 

He thinks sometimes that she might remind him of his mother.] 

Over the course of several weeks after their reunion, Hannibal tests his theory. He pushes Will’s limits and notes the results—or lack thereof—with some increasing alarm. He wakes Will at all hours of the night when he knows there's an early class. He demands three, four rounds of Will pinned and panting under him, even though Will drags sluggish through every moment, bleary and exhausted. Once, Will falls into a fitful sleep flat on his belly with Hannibal still buried inside him and when Hannibal realizes, he only stares down at the greasy tangle of Will’s hair for several blank minutes and wonders if he should stop. 

[He is not at all certain that he can.] 

He corners Will in his office more often than he visits for lunch, backs him against the desk and onto his knees with the door still ajar and Will's office hours technically still in session. Hannibal supposes he should be grateful that Will's students, while attentive, are not precisely eager to be caught alone in a room with the infamous Professor Graham. 

In all these moments of shared indiscretion, Will never actually says the word aloud. Not once. 

Hannibal is— _grateful_ isn't the right thing to call it, necessarily, but he is relieved that he's spared the awkward conversation that would surely follow, Will sullen and scowling, folded up into himself, rigid the way he only gets when he's really humiliated. 

It is not, Hannibal thinks, for any lack of wanting to on Will's part. He imagines that he can see it sometimes, glistening on the pointed tip of Will's tongue, tucked just behind the ridge of his teeth, but the man bites it back every single time. Bites into himself, sometimes, smothers it into the meat of his hand because still, his own blood between his teeth is a preferred alternative to being honest with Hannibal. To trusting Hannibal with the worst of him, though Hannibal would think _that_ particular ship had sailed long ago. 

[It makes no sense at all for him to begrudge Will that dishonesty. He doesn’t want to hear it, he loathes the clear parallel Will is so eager to draw and yet— 

Hannibal understands the drive, in the educated parts of him that—still—catalogue each of Will's idiosyncrasies for later review. He is familiar with what is, really, not a particularly strange fetish, and he can even see the appeal, albeit in a detached sense, of the paternal figure. There is some comfort in being provided for that Will, hypersexed from a criminally young age, can only find in the simplicity of being cared for. 

If Hannibal had the luxury of impartiality still, if they still held to their weekly sessions, he might point out that Will allowing himself to be cared for in any capacity is progress, that although the particulars may not be healthy, the motivation undoubtedly is. He might tell Will that it is entirely normal, seeking a stand-in for an inadequate father. 

He understands that it is only an act of survival for Will’s brain to re-wire itself, to train itself to press _into_ the sting of an open palm against skin instead of pulling away. He understands that Will cannot help it any more than he can help the way his breath catches and holds in his chest sometimes. 

Still.] 

 

 

* 

 

 

“Dude. _Dude_. There’s—man, did you know there’s actually a waiting list for this fuckin’ thing? Must’ve hit three shops before I got my hands on one, and you’da thought the guy was selling me the goddamn Arc of the Covenant, way he acted.” The boy slumped in his doorway shoves mirrored sunglasses up into a shock of blonde hair, grins. Hannibal absently notes three new bandages since their last visit, including a plaster taped over what looks to be a freshly-broken nose, still swollen and purpled, not more than a few days old. 

Hannibal manages to keep his expression placid at the address. The young man is not being deliberately rude—he thinks it might be a genuine attempt at familiarity, clumsy reaction to his clear-cut teenage discomfort around figures of authority, but he does not smile at Spencer Madison as he holds the office door open and stands aside. 

“Please. Do come in.” 

Madison slouches past him to the familiarity of the patient chair, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his purple hooded sweatshirt. It’s an ugly color on him, garish contrast to his deeply-tanned skin, but Hannibal isn’t certain he’s ever seen the boy wearing anything else during their several years of acquaintance. Madison drops flops into the chair, sighs, “Man, I did _not_ miss you,” to it, fondly. 

“What happened to your nose?” Hannibal asks as he pours Madison a glass of water from the pitcher on his desk, ignoring the boy’s hopeful, pointed glances at the decanter of scotch perched next to the pitcher. 

Madison kicks at the skateboard he’d dropped at his feet and says, smoothly enough— _practiced_ enough—that anyone but Hannibal might believe it, "Fell off this thing. Clumsy. You know how it is.” 

Hannibal knows exactly how it is, but the boy isn’t his patient anymore--hasn't been for nearly a year, in fact--so he only makes a small sound of agreement as he hands the glass over. 

“Thanks,” Madison says and drains it in two swallows. “So, Doc, not to be crass, but—my money? This ain’t exactly a social visit, y’know. No offense.” From the pocket of his sweatshirt, Madison pulls a small parcel, neatly wrapped up in a black plastic bag, taped at the corners. Though the boy’s eyes are glazed pinkish, though he’s very clearly not sober, he’s sealed it deftly enough that even Hannibal’s considerable sense of smell cannot detect much more than a lingering trace of the scent. Hannibal, in spite of himself, is nearly impressed. 

“Of course,” Hannibal pulls a thick, cream-colored envelope from the inside pocket of his coat, extending it to the boy. “I do appreciate your discretion.” 

Madison snorts and slits the envelope open deftly with his thumbnail, ruffling through the bills once, twice, and then cocking his head up at Hannibal with a frown. “This is double what it’s worth, Doc.” 

“Consider it a down payment,” Hannibal says. “On your continued discretion. I’ll be requiring a steady supply, assuming this goes well.” 

Madison blinks. “Uh. Okay? I don’t—I probably don’t actually want any details here, hunh.” He pockets the envelope regardless, shrugs, scrubs a hand roughly through his hair. “You know what, you do you. I’ve got the green if _you’ve_ got the green.” He laughs as he shoves himself to his feet,  clearly pleased with himself.  


Hannibal manages what he thinks might be a placating smile. “That won’t be a problem.” 

Madison picks up his skateboard, tucking it against his side. He shrugs. “I wasn’t worried. Just text me whenever you need to pick up, I guess? For you, I don’t mind delivering.” 

“You spoil me,” Hannibal says. “Thank you, Spencer. Do be careful on that thing.” 

“Yes _sir_.” Madison flicks him a jaunty, two-fingered salute and ducks out the office door, leaving Hannibal alone, the packet still clenched absent in one hand. 

He stares down at it for several long moments. Finally, he shoves it into the top drawer of his desk amid a ragtag collection of pens, and pours himself a generous measure of the scotch, closer to a fist than a finger. 

_I’ve bought you something_ , he texts Will, only when the glass has been emptied and refilled. He empties it again. 

Throughout the rest of his appointments for the afternoon, he keeps the phone at his elbow, waiting for the familiar buzz of a reply that never comes.


	10. there are things that used to make you smile (one of them was me for just a little while)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Beverly comes over for dinner and Will handles it poorly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> read notes at the end of the chapter for updated trigger warnings please and thank

Will comes home—and what a strange, fluid concept _that_ has become since now it begins and ends with Hannibal's warm weight familiar beside him, rather than any fixed address—to Beverly, perched on the railing of his front porch, her dirty work boots propped on a support beam as she alternates smoking a cigarette and sipping what looks very much like Hannibal's scotch from a heavy crystal tumbler that he knows has never seen the dusty interior of his kitchen cabinets.

It took him a moment to recognize her, outside of the sterile context of her lab. She is dressed not in the crisp professionalism he's used to, but in worn jeans and an ill-fitting man's plaid shirt, knotted in at the waist. It’s a shirt, actually, that he recognizes from the second button down, stitched frustratingly on with a length of bright green thread when he had run out of black. Her hair is damp, brushed back into a ragged bun at the base of her neck, her face free of makeup, and she smells not of her usual chemicals and the faint stink of old blood, but of Will's own cheap store-brand soap…which all adds up to the conclusion that she had showered and dressed herself in Will's borrowed clothing sometime within the last hour.

"Hi," he says carefully. "Uh. Did I not lock my door again?"

Bev laughs, a warmer thing than he's heard from her in weeks and he lets himself relax half a degree. "No, _jeez_ , I'm not a total creep. Your boyfriend let me in."

Will winces. "Please don't call him that."

She nods, tipping her drink in his direction in jaunty acknowledgement. ”Hey," she says with an easy shrug, "whatever you want to call him, he's got _excellent_ taste in booze. I told him I was fine with the Jack, but he just got this look on his face like I'd run over one of the dogs. I was afraid to even ask if he'd let me mix it with Coke." She leans towards him to mock-whisper, "I had to sneak the ice cubes when he wasn't looking."

Will chuckles. "Is that why you're being a blatant hypocrite on my front porch?" When she blinks at him, confused, he nods to the forgotten cigarette slow-burning its way down to her lax fingers. "I seem to remember a few heated lectures on this topic."

"I only smoke when I drink," she says, flicking the ash with suspicious expertise into the bushes. "And you know very well that the smoking was the least of my concerns."

Will looks away at that, stung. "I know."

Of _course_ he knows. It’s not like it wasn't going to come up eventually—they came and went together, most days, and Hannibal's hand lingers on Will now whenever Will allows it, braces against the back of his neck, slides into the small of his back, curls fond around his elbow. The most irritating thing about their particular crime-scene crew is their incessant need to know everything, closely followed their even more incessant need to share it like celebrity gossip among themselves, so Will knew there would be questions at some point. He's very nearly glad that she was the one who's caved—he’s having a hard time finding the mental image of Zeller dressed in his clothes, smoking a stolen cigarette quite as endearing.

He should have told her weeks ago. After all, she'd been trying, hadn't she, to protect him in her own own way. She'd been worried, she'd been invested in his pretend abuser, even if he hadn't been, and despite his constant snapping at her that he was fine, everything was fine, she never quite gave up on him. 

But it isn't exactly easy, is it, to corner a coworker who may as well be a stranger for all that he really knows anything about her, and explain that the bruises were okay, that they were actually _more than okay, thanks for the concern, but I asked for every single one of them so it's not technically even Hannibal's fault, Bev, he's a killer but I don't think he_ likes _hurting me._

(And then he’d have to explain to her why that was actually a _problem_ for him, which—he thinks he’d rather she saw his chest open to see the slick black of his insides for herself, thanks.)

He likes Beverly, likes the vicious way she smiles when she's presented with a new body to take apart, like she's about to unwrap a Christmas present. He likes that she takes unabashed pride in what she does and how well she does it, despite the way Jack wrinkles his nose every time she or one of her coworkers cracks an badly-timed joke at the victim's expense. He likes, mostly, that she doesn't care what Jack thinks of her, because Will is all too familiar with the disappointed way Jack says his name by this point, too familiar with the dull way it sinks into his gut and lingers with him for hours.

"Here's the thing," Beverly says finally and holds the glass out to him, inviting, "I don’t—I'm not good at living people, okay."

He takes the glass. "Okay," he says warily, propping himself against the railing catty-corner to her perch. She shifts her feet to make room.

"I just—“ she makes an abrupt, frustrated noise coupled with a jerky wave of her free hand, gesturing at the empty space between them. "I shouldn't have pried," she says.  "I shouldn’t have—you didn't owe me an explanation, Will. I'm sorry. It's none of my business."

Ah. 

"Alana talked to you," Will guesses. 

Beverly has the good grace to at least look vaguely ashamed of herself. "Yeah," she admits, sheepish.  "She called me yesterday. I guess she talked to Hannibal or something, I dunno.”

Will takes a sip of the scotch, chases the precious, bitter burn of it with another long pull, then a third. It’s better with the ice, he will never ever tell Hannibal, not so overwhelming to his underdeveloped palette, and for just a moment, he loves Beverly for her tiny rebellion against Hannibal’s standards. He waits. Doesn't say a word. Finally, she clears her throat and says, awkwardly, "It, I mean. He. It's...good? To you?"

Will tilts his head and for a beat he is silent, considering. He thinks of broad hands wrapped noose-tight around his wrists, the wet summer hurricane-heat of bare skin slick against his and, bizarrely, he thinks of those same broad hands half-buried in a dog's thick fur, scratching gentle, slow circles. "Yeah," he manages, and smiles absently down at the glass in his hand. Blames the heat in his chest on the scotch. ”It’s...good."

(He's not quite surprised to find that he means it.)

She takes a last drag from her cigarette before dropping it to the porch floor, swinging her legs over the edge to crush the cherry out with the toe of her boot. “And if he ever wasn’t,” she starts and holds up a hand when he makes a noise of protest, “No, hey, shut up. If he ever _wasn’t_ , you know my door’s open. That’s all. Just tell me you know that, and I will drop this forever because he’s making something _seriously_ amazing in there, and I’ve been camping in the woods for three days.”

Will frowns. “You’ve what?”

She sighs, long-suffering, and says, “My sister-in-law wants to bond with me or something, so I get dragged on these godawful hunting trips. She did two tours in Iraq and now she works that out by killing helpless deer, I guess, so we made a deal—I’ll go on her trips with her to carry her shit and open her beers, and she’ll actually butcher them properly and let me give away the meat. I could hear about twenty dogs in there when I visited last time, so I figured you could use some of it.”

She hops down off the railing and neatly plucks her drink from Will’s hand as she glides past him for the front door. “Hannnibal invited me to stay for dinner,” she tosses over her shoulder as she disappears inside, and abruptly, just like _that_ , the pleasant honey-warmth of the moment drains from him. Something prickling and cold skitters its way up his spine, the chill settling sick in his belly, because Hannibal has no reason to be anything but cordially distant to Beverly.

Alana, he has time invested into—he has cultivated some shred of her loyalty, and though Will can’t imagine she’d stand for him now, she has known Hannibal longer than any of them. There is something to be said for her continued survival; she’s somehow managed to play her cards right without ever realizing she’s even in the game.

Beverly, though, Hannibal has no real need for. Beverly, he scarcely knows aside from their occasional forced proximity, so why, why bother being _kind_ to her? Hannibal is nothing if not meticulous with his attentions, but he’s let Beverly into his home to shower and borrow clothes as if they were old friends, which. It doesn’t make _sense_.

(Unless—he's killed with Hannibal as his audience now, hasn't he?

Maybe Hannibal intends to repay the favor.)

“Yeah, okay,” he croaks, to no one in particular.

 

 

*

 

 

The dinner goes off without a hitch, aside from the way Will’s got his fingernails sunk deep into his thighs, fingernails biting nasty crescents into the skin.

Later, when he has packed Beverly a portion of the leftovers in a glass container (venison medallions, lightly pan-fried in oil, served with a blackberry and redcurrant jam, delicate enough to melt on the tongue and Bev had made appreciative noises, though every bite had turned to ash in Will’s mouth) when he has bid her a fond goodnight and a safe drive home, Hannibal will lay Will gently out across the bed they share.

He will touch his fingertips to each ragged moon, and study the way they flush white when he presses in with his thumb, the way they fill purple with blood again when he lets go. He will sigh softly to himself, and he will not say a thing.

“I’m sorry,” Will mumbles to the ceiling, but only once Hannibal’s tossing has ceased and the breath beside him has evened into a rhythm familiar now to him as the wash of waves along his toes, sunk deep and dark and cold into the murky waters of the Mississippi.

 

 

 

*

 

 

“I'm sorry?" Will manages, and it stutters out of him, an automatic politeness his mother would have been proud of, that bone-deep southern-bred habit. “Uh…what is this, exactly?"

Hannibal raises one heavy brow and examines the plastic bag in his hand. "I would think you could recognize it," he says mildly, and of _course_ he recognizes it. Will can smell it from here, even through the Ziploc, the teenaged stoner in him brightening at the citrus notes, automatically cataloguing the fat, tight-furled nuggets, delicate purple-red fibers bristling with tiny, spun-sugar crystals.

_That’s a shit-ton of weed_ , that teenage stoner thinks. 

His eyes flick up, though, catching on Hannibal's placid gaze for the briefest moment before veering off to the left—the lying side? he can never remember—and he says, "Okay, so we're finally going to talk about that." 

"There is nothing to discuss," Hannibal replies and lifts one shoulder in easy dismissal. "You self-medicate by any means necessary. I don’t advise you use it in the field of course, but in certain situations, I can see how it might be very beneficial to you. Certainly an improvement over your current attempt to pickle your liver.” He presses the bag into Will's stilled hand and adds, "I've taken the liberty of purchasing a vaporizer for you. I hope you don't mind--I was afraid you might try using the pipe I found in the back of your sock drawer."

He gestures to the dining room table where there is a slim, matte-black piece of machinery the size of his hand already plugged into his computer, glowing with a clover pattern of cheery green lights. Will stares as it for several long moments, but only manages, “Why were you in my sock drawer?"

Hannibal doesn't dignify that with a reply. Instead, he neatly detaches the thing from its charging cradle and presses it into Will’s palm. ”The vapor is significantly better for your lungs, although it may not produce the effects you are used to. I understand it to be much more of a bodily sensation than the way you've been consuming it. it should only take a minute to heat up—but you’ll want to wait until the lights change from purple to green.”

"I haven't smoked consistently in ten years," Will says. "What you saw was a, a one-off." He takes the thing, though, and presses it to his mouth, inhales, lets it hitch and sit stifling in his lungs 'til he's near-dizzy from lack of oxygen. When he exhales, it rolls out thick between his teeth.

It tastes wet, clean, like breathing in steam from the shower with only the faintest note of something burnt. Just that single lungful hits him like a sledgehammer to the frontal lobe on the exhale, drags his eyelids heavy as molasses down to half mast and mires him in this pleasant, fluid prickling all down his limbs. Will shivers. Takes another hit, holds it longer this time. Another.

Hannibal smiles.

"Does that mean you're not sharing?" Will asks, suddenly conscious of his own behavior in contrast to a sober Hannibal. Is he listing to one side? Are his eyes glossy yet? Bloodshot? He often embarrasses himself in anything approaching polite company, and he can only imagine what he must look like, mussed and glazed over—except this is supposed to be making him less anxious, not more, so he takes anther enormous draw from the thing. His body still remembers that there is a critical point fast approaching when he will be far too lax and heavy to care.

Hannibal takes the vaporizer from him after the sixth inhale and sets it back on the tabletop, well out of Will’s grasp. "No," he says, and looks very nearly apologetic. "Should you have a poor reaction, I thought it best one of us remain coherent."

It is an excellent point. Will despises him for it, a little.

Because if he's honest, he wants—that’s it, isn’t it, he doesn’t want _best_ or _safe_ or the way Hannibal touches him sometimes like he’s sculpted from sand and seawater, like Will might crumble apart in his hands. He doesn’t want the way Hannibal pushes the hair out of his eyes in the early mornings, sometimes, when he has just blinked awake, when he is warm and heavy with sleep still and has not quite remembered the jagged thing still stretches between them.

He wants Hannibal undone, truly undone, out of his mind and raw and furious, bared teeth and heavy hands. He wants _genuine goddamned violence_ because it doesn’t count for anything otherwise. It doesn’t count when Hannibal murmurs _are you alright, Will, tap my hand twice if you need to breathe, three times if you want me to let go_ warm into the shell of his ear instead of biting into the cartilage until he tries to twist away. He wants something worlds divorced from this polite, lazy thing he shares a bed with instead, this thing that is so careful to press only as much as Will is able to bend, to check unconsciously for fractures along his surface afterwards. It's viciously, terribly unfair that he is allowed his distance when Will isn’t. He’s seen Will gutted and spilled, seen the very animal worst of him—why is Hannibal spared the same?

"What were you hoping to achieve here?" Will is definitely wavering now and he's trying to remember if—no, he hasn't eaten anything actually substantial today and perhaps that's why he's shaky as he is, shivering in the grip Hannibal has braced against his arm.

"Nothing. I only thought it might give you some temporary measure of peace. Are you cold?" Hannibal asks and Will can't tell what he is anymore, honestly, so it's entirely possible he might be. He nods dimly, and Hannibal steers him to the massive couch. Will sinks gratefully into buttery leather and he swears he only closes his eyes for a moment before Hannibal is back, coaxing him into a denim shirt, incongruously hooded and lined with warm flannel. It’s a practical thing, artfully faded much too young for Hannibal's taste, and it most certainly did _not_ come from Will’s closet.

"Did you buy me clothes?" he asks muzzily as Hannibal half-lifts him from the couch to guide him into the shirt, which is soft and suspiciously well-fitted.  Hannibal hums an agreement.

"It looked like something you might like," is all he says on the matter, though, and then he's easing Will back into his supine position, tucking the shirt closed over his belly. "How are you feeling?" 

"Heavy," Will thrums. "Warm. Cold. I dunno, I feel all—“ he wiggles his fingers lazily. "You know. Do you know?"

"I have before, yes, when I was much younger. I disliked the way it fogged my thoughts." 

Will grins. It feels sharp, and tight, his incisors pressing neat into the furrow he's chewed into his lower lip. "That's the crux of where we differ, isn't it." He plucks absent at the buttons of the jacket. They're real wood, polished to a rich shine, smooth when he rubs the callused pad of one thumb over them. They're hand-stitched, and the wool is thick, plush, not even the slightest bit itchy. It is likely more expensive than any piece of clothing he owns. He files that small irk away to examine later. "I'd give anything to do that."

"I am aware, Will. I understand your proclivities." _Understand_ does not equate to _accept_ does not equate to _share_ , though, and that's part of the problem, too.

Hannibal takes the seat next to him, hands folded loose in his lap. Will stares at them, wonders what would happen if he seized Hannibal by the wrist, if he wrenched back his pinky until the bone snapped, brittle-wet as a green twig. If he wrenched each joint out of place, pulled until tendons screamed, could he make Hannibal cry? He wonders what it would take to wring a plea from that smiling mouth, to prick tears into those flat, calm eyes, but he has the feeling that Hannibal would make no sound of protest and simply _allow_ it to happen.

"So, what, was the plan to just get me stoned and let me sleep it off on your couch? Because those pills you gave me have been knocking me out. I've been sleeping fine."

(he's doubled the dose and chased the pills with pig-swill bourbon and he is _very fucking far_ from fine)

"Hardly," Hannibal says, and does not elaborate further. Just waits, patient, the way he used to in their sessions, biding his time until Will volunteers something he can sink his teeth into.

"Is it—I mean, did you want to—“

"No," Hannibal says, quickly enough that Will flinches. Only that morning, Hannibal had pressed Will up against the bedroom door rather enthusiastically, and there had been none of this careful reticence then, so—something’s changed. Will isn't sure what.

And then, in Hannibal's gentlest voice, his eyes fixed somewhere a good two feet to Will's right, "I will not carry on the way we have been. Not unless you will allow me to proceed properly. Safely. With a stop word, and appropriate negotiations."

Will blinks. 

"I have been _researching_ ," Hannibal finishes, and it almost sounds like a threat. “You’re an intelligent man. I refuse to believe that you haven't done the same."

He has. Of course he has. The moment he'd staggered out into the world, a seventeen-year-old, white-trash runaway with somehow even less professional skills than he’d had social, he'd researched. He'd been—ecstatic, really, to find out he wasn't the only person to prefer a rough touch, thrilled to not be alone in this nauseating aspect of himself. It had been the first relief he’d felt in over a decade, those weeks he’d spent holed up in the public library, reading and rereading study after study proving it was no defect in him, no inherent brokenness that made him seek out the very thing that marred him in the first place. Except--

"It isn't the same," he says miserably and lets his eyes slide shut. "Like that. With—with safewords, and collaring and the whole—the ritual of it, Hannibal, it's ridiculous. It feels absurd. It doesn't work." 

"It shouldn't be the same. Will, there is a very large distinction between controlled, safe exploration and what you're doing."

"What _we're_ doing."

"This is not for _my_ peace of mind," Hannibal says sharply. It is so rare to hear anything but his even calm that Will draws back as though he'd been struck. "I'm growing tired of continually paying for the sins of another man—I am not your father, Will. Tell me you know that. Tell me you _understand_ that.”

"Of course I know that," Will murmurs and later, he will conveniently edit from his memory the pitiful way his voice creaks on the last word.

“I’m willing to negotiate.” Will risks a glance up at that, puzzled, but Hannibal’s face is turned firmly away from him, the line of his jaw set rigid as granite. His voice is low, even, barely neutral as he clears his throat and says, “Allow me a stop word—one word, whether you’ll use it or not. That’s all I ask.”

Will narrows his eyes. “And?”

“‘And’ nothing,” Hannibal growls. “Just a stop word, and I’ll do whatever it is you require of me.”

_Well_ then.

 

 

*

 

 

When Hannibal wakes the next morning, Will and the dogs are gone, the rumpled space beside him long since cooled. Will’s phone sits on the bedside table beside his own, though, so he’s likely just taken them for a run in the fields behind the lonely little house.

Hannibal checks the time on his own phone—nine AM, nearly, and one incoming text.

_**Will**  _

_wendigo_

 

A moment later, Will’s phone lights up with a soft _ping_ at his reply.

**_Hannibal Lecter_**

_Thank you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> uhhhh man okay. so first of all, real unhealthy attitudes about bdsm here that are def. not safe, sane and consensual. but we're at least angling a little more towards consensual non consent maybe? also feat. noncon/rape fantasies and kink negotiation, sort of.
> 
> illegal (consensual) drug use, unless you're one of the lucky few in a place that's legalized already.
> 
> goddamn i'm sorry about all this but i love y'all. i'll stop dragging them through broken glass at some point probably.
> 
> (if anyone's curious, the vaporizer Hannibal buys is the Pax 2, which is like the goddamn Bentley of vaporizers)


	11. i'm not sure how this is supposed to feel (cutting like a red-hot knife of surgical steel)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hey guys, this is not a complete chapter, more like a teaser of what's to come.
> 
> i'm so sorry this has taken me so long. i am the worst.

Will is, as it turns out, not exactly well-suited to sharing space.

 

It's nothing quite so banal as moving in together, what they wind up doing. Rather, Hannibal opts to keep a few things in an empty drawer of Will's dresser and a spare toothbrush in the master bath, largely because is is impractical to expect Will to drive all the way to Wolf Trap to feed his dogs and then to Hannibal's house every day. 

 

Will hands him a key in a plain, unsealed envelope with absolutely no fanfare about it, and Hannibal finds he prefers is that way. He's not sure if he's the first partner Will has lived with.

 

He does not ask.

 

He finds that he very nearly likes the dusty charm of the place, the solitude. He likes the way the afternoon sun filters in through the trees through the living-room window. He even, after some relatively minor adjustments, finds that he likes cooking in the cramped little kitchen. 

 

He certainly likes waking up to Will burrowed into his side, face blessedly, unfamiliarly slack in sleep.

 

Willl is, perhaps...slightly less taken with the situation.

 

In spite of his extensive experience with it—new roommate each year in school, he'd said once offhand, and he could never quite bring himself to resent them for it, because he'd jump at the chance to do the same damn thing if he could—Hannibal sees the way he grinds his teeth every time Hannibal pokes tentative into an unfamiliar drawer. He wonders if those roommates (likely awkward, lanky teenage things with barely a fumbling understanding of their own hormone-driven bodies, never mind any possible sympathy or understanding of the onset of mental illness) were treated to the same furious glare, the same bright, animal eyes as though they were infringing on claimed ground.

 

He supposes if he's being literal, he is.

 

It's a clear tell of where to look for Will's still-buried secrets. Hannibal might have ignored it, were he not so driven to maddening boredom by Will's recent predilection for monosyllabic communication. 

 

Lately, Will is barely willing to look at Hannibal unless a hand snarled in his hair demands it. Hannibal thinks he might be forgiven for jumping at the chance at seeing _something_ beyond the sweating, panting, surface of Will's skin. 

 

 

(It isn't that he doesn't enjoy the wretched thing Will falls into in bed—no, he is too much an opportunist, too much a hedonist to be blind to the appeal of such an enthusiastic partner, but—

 

It isn't enough. Somehow, after years of self-imposed solitude, it isn’t _enough._ )

 

That ‘something’ turns out to be a flat pine box from the hall closet where Hannibal is attempting to store some towels. He unearths it, puzzled, from beneath an extremely musty pile of sweaters he's never seen Will wear. 

 

Two months ago, Hannibal might have been compelled to point out that Will does himself no favors with the way he snarls up the knotted muscles of his shoulders when Hannibal treads too close to something tender. 

 

Two months ago, he might have been gentle with Will. He might have coaxed a reason out of the man. He might have asked what it is that makes him trust the killer in his bed to truss him up like an amateur escape artist, but has him biting a ragged hole into his lower lip, eyes furiously trained on the scuffed toes of his boots when Hannibal so much as politely asks what, exactly, he's doing with a faded police uniform hidden in his linen closet. 

 

Will is barefoot in front of the sink, methodically washing the last of the night's dishes, wrist-deep in soap suds, humming something soft and atonal to himself when:

 

"Will. What is this?"

 

Will slants a look back over his shoulder and freezes like he's been electrocuted, goes stock-still as a rabbit frozen in the face of baying hounds. Barely, Hannibal can see the rise and fall of his chest, stuttering, uneven. He's frightened.

 

_Interesting._

 

The faded navy-blue cotton—bleached out by what must have been a warm climate, from the short sleeves—is sun-faded and worn almost threadbare in places. He runs his thumb over the crescent embroidered into the shoulder patch. Pauses with the pad of a finger pressed over the nametag, obscuring the 'G' of "Graham." The thing is shabby, despite what was probably a decent amount of effort and expensive color-stay laundry detergent on Will's part. 

 

It looks strange and out of place in Hannibal's manicured hands.

 

"I didn't know you were an officer," Hannibal murmurs. _Pleased_ isn't the right word for the unfurling heat in his chest, but it's close. Fond. The way a normal man might (he’s fairly sure) react to finding an old uniform their significant other had worn once, this warm burr of arousal and genuine curiosity. 

 

Will shivers. Hannibal politely declines to point it out.

 

"I'm not going to wear it for you, if that's what you're asking," Will says finally, and he's trying for teasing, or even wry, maybe, but it stutters out cracked and awkward instead. Hannibal only tilts his head as though he doesn't understand the joke.  "Never mind," Will mutters, and reaches for a dish towel to start drying. "Why the sudden interest, anyway? You've been poking around in my stuff for weeks. What are you hoping to find?"

 

Hannibal is quiet for so long that Will actually glances back over his shoulder to make sure he hasn't left. He hasn’t—he's just standing there, staring down at the musty bundle of Will's former life in his hands like it means something simply because Will's shoved it into a closet and forgot it. 

 

He realizes, with some degree of alarm, that he has no idea if it does. No clue if it was the sort of thing that got dragged along every move, just sentimental enough for Will to feel guilty about disposing of it, or the sort of thing that explained the razor-wire way Will's shoulders snap up somewhere around his ears every time Hannibal touches him.

 

"I know so little about you," he says finally and the faintest crease draws itself between his brows. Will waits—watching Hannibal sidelong because he is unpredictable like this, rattlingly human—but he does not elaborate. He only studies the uniform a moment more before he pats it back into place in its box and secures the tiny latch. He sets in on the sideboard.

 

Will's finished the dishes by the time he speaks again, this time from barely six inches away. His voice is hushed, reverent, as though the silence stretching between them was something hallowed. "That uniform would have fit a much smaller man," he murmurs into Will's left ear. His hands bracket Will's ribcage, broad fingers splayed as if to demonstrate the sheer breadth of him. "You were very young when you were on the force, or very sick. Which was it, please?"

 

Will makes a sound that isn't a laugh. "Both?" he offers. "I didn't have the money for school when I left home. It was police or military, and I didn't think the military would take me." He taps his temple with a dry knuckle. "Psych evaluations and all."

 

"Ah," Hannibal says and his hands slip down to brace against Will's hips, pausing only for a moment before clever fingers are untucking Will's shirt and flicking open the buttons. "So you would have been, what—eighteen?”

 

"Twenty," Will corrects softly as Hannibal rucks up his undershirt over the curve of his belly. "Had a few odd jobs as a mechanic before that. Uh, boats, mostly. I wasn't much good with cars, but I'd picked a few things up watching Dad work. Got me through a few years 'til I was old enough to qualify."

 

Hannibal hums contentedly and presses his face into Will's hair, breathing in the slight unpleasant rank of fear-sweet and musky dog. He can distinctly remember a time when the cheap cologne made him wrinkle his nose—now, it sets something warm and new thrumming in the pit of his belly. "How old were you when you left home?" 

 

"Sixteen."

 

It is slurred, as though he might not have quite meant to say it. Hannibal’s hands, working lazy now at the button of Will's jeans, pause. He frowns.

 

“In your third session with me, you told me you were eighteen,”

 

For all of two heartbeats, Will is silent. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, actually, and then—

 

“Wendigo, hey, no, fuck,  _wendigo,”_ he gasps out and before Hannibal can even process what’s happened, he’s twisting out of his grip and vanishing through the screen door into the backyard.


	12. here it is again, yet it stings like the first time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys
> 
>  
> 
> If it wasn’t evident fro my choice in chapter titles, i am kind of a scuzzy punk kid. i found out recently from some of my crusty friends that New Orleans is a pretty big hub for traveling kids so…
> 
>  
> 
> This happened and I, uh...yeah. Sorry. There is an extended, grosser version of this chapter in a separate post [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6284683) because i got a little off course so this one's a little weird but fuck it, i'm having fun and it's better than another six month hiatus i guess?
> 
>  
> 
> If you’re familiar with this story by this point, so...
> 
>  
> 
> Please please please see end notes for trigger warnings

 

Hannibal finds the picture in the bathroom cabinet, of all places, tucked into a small leather bag.

 

He barely pays it any mind at first because the bag also contains a copy of Will's passport, a change of casual clothes and a wad of five hundred dollars in twenties, which is far more concerning than an old memento.

 

He returns the passport to Will's desk and leaves the money on the kitchen counter with a note-- _So dinner's on you tonight, I presume?_

 

He means it as a joke. It does not really allow Will to escape the inevitable conversation about why he has an emergency bag stashed beneath his sink, but he thinks it is light enough to be almost nonthreatening. He isn't angry, only puzzled, though the idea that Will's budget for survival on the road is so low alarms him deeply.

 

When he gets home that evening, however, Will's sitting on the edge of the couch with the picture in a rigid, white-knuckled grip. His head snaps up when Hannibal lets the door swing shut behind him. In the dusky half-light of the living room, his eyes glint like an animal's

 

"Where'd you find this," he snarls. "Why are you--what the fuck are you  _looking_ _for?"_

 

"Who are they?" Hannibal asks, instead of answering the question. "You don't keep many pictures around the house, Will. Indulge my curiosity just this once."

 

For a very long time, Will glares down at the photograph and doesn't speak.

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

It happens finally on a Tuesday afternoon after a long, long string of bad days and worse evenings, that he reaches his breaking point.

 

Will is strung tight and tense, has been for three exhausting weeks now. His every nerve is braced for those moments—almost every night now, no break in between to catch his breath, no time to  _recover_ —in which his father, flushed with courage that smells an awful lot like Jack Daniels' will reach for him. Will snatch him as he passes in the hallway, hold him by the wrist, by the scruff of the neck as he ducks into the bathroom and, one memorable time, by the back of the skull followed a brutal slam of his forehead into the corrugated metal of the trailer wall. 

 

Will almost misses the days when he was small enough to ball himself up into tiny spaces, small enough to keep himself hidden in the corners of his father's awareness. When he'd been caught it had hurt more then, of course—less surface area to disperse the pain, he supposed, still-developing nervous system and a narrow frame that wasn't suited to the intrusions of his father's blunt fingers, never mind anything else. 

 

That, at least, has eased with age and growth. 

 

Small fuckin' favors.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

_You take it like a pro_ , Dad had hissed only the week before as he'd shuddered and come on the stripes crisscrossing Will's lower back. His panting bulk collapses boneless against the wounds with little regard to the fact that they were still throbbing and red, some of them weeping where his skin had split. 

 

Will moaned in nothing but sheer animal terror, his mind firing frantic on all cylinders, howling at him to run as far as his shaking legs would take him, run until he collapsed,  _anything_ to escape from the weight of the creature on his back. He could only squirm, of course, in absolute overwhelm because it burned like a poker laid flat across his skin, ached like he'd run ten miles in as many minutes, and his father was heavy enough that it was really difficult to breathe.

 

 

A big hand wrapped around his cock, sure and stead as if he’d begged aloud for it, coaxing out a bitten cry from the sick place in the pit of his belly where there lurked the urge to sink his teeth into that hand, to bite 'til he drew blood, to fight back. 

 

He came, eventually. Of course he did. He always did. He hated himself for it. 

 

The world kept right on spinning.

 

After, he lay on his belly, trying his best not to move and asked, “When you said 'like a pro,' did you mean—should I get myself tested?"

 

His father gave him a black eye for the question and—after his requisite cooldown period, after Will brought him beer after sweating beer, silent except to ask  _hey, want another?_ —he handed Will the number of a nearby clinic. 

 

The day of his appointment, before he left for work, Dad grabbed him by the chin, wrenched his head up so Will was forced to look him in the eye, and said, in a tone that brooked no argument, "Straight home afterwards, hear me? I know how long it takes to walk back from the bus stop. If you're not home by the time I call—“ he trailed off with a shrug and let go. "Don't be late."

 

Will had nodded, dazed. He’d left. Sat through the bus ride and the waiting room and the bloodwork and the prodding and the uncomfortable questions with his head empty and buzzing, feeling for all the world like his skull was stuffed full of cotton. They asked if he was hurt anywhere. He shook his head. He lied and lied and  _lied_ in a perfect even deadpan, unblinking, as he wondered frantically if his jeans were dark enough to mask any potential bleeding.

 

They believed him. They were overwhelmed with patients, so it wasn't as though they had the time  _not_ to, and anyways, he was sixteen, not six. He was capable of defending himself if he’d really wanted to. It had all gone quickly enough from there until the nurse with the soft grey eyes gestured to his bruised face and tried to press the number for a local shelter into his hand. 

 

He had promptly started hyperventilating. He thought he might have stammered something indecipherable about needing to be home to walk the dog, maybe, but thank you, see you next time, you have a good day now and  _fled_ .

 

He didn’t remember any of the bus ride home.He did, however, make it in the door just in time for the phone to ring.

 

Three days later, it rang again. The test came back clean.

 

Will tried his best not to be disappointed.

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

Dad has been getting worse over the course of the past few months, in massive increments that he's sort of starting to find alarming.

 

He’d have to be blind not to make the connection between the sudden shift in temper and the toll his mother's cancer is taking on the man. On some level, he figures, Dad must still love her. He rarely so much as raises his voice to her, these days. He sees the way his father’s face ages ten years in the span of six months as Momma withers away in her bed, drowning herself in cheap gin like she’s not only accepted death, but has decided to race it to the finish line. Some days, she’s so still and quiet Will thinks she might be practicing for the coffin.

 

He tries to find it in himself to forgive his father. He does. He tries to watch his step, to be careful, tries to placate him when possible and duck when not, but the demands have become so increasingly irrational, so downright  _paranoid_ , he’s not sure how he's supposed to keep up. 

 

It’s terrifying.

 

He thinks it could be the drinking, at least in part. Thinks, too, after a few covert sessions spent holed up in the library after school, struggling to drag his exhausted brain through academic explorations of  _mania_ and  _paranoia_ and  _delusions_ , that his father probably didn't ever come home from war all the way.

 

It's...not comforting, grasping at these straws. His pelvis still aches dully, enough that he has to kind of limp his way through gym class, and he still throws up every lunch in the cramped hallway bathroom no one uses due to its relative isolation from the cafeteria, so it doesn’t really make him feel any better. He still blanks out during class, still forgets his homework, and his test days and what day of the week it is and to change his shirt sometimes for six days in a row. It doesn’t change anything, exactly.

 

It just, it soothes him a little to think of it as a disease. 

 

A disease is no one's fault. A disease strikes randomly and without purpose and—and it means that it isn't  _him_ . That he somehow isn't worthy only of love at the buckle end of a belt, that there's a possibility that he is the product of a wretched situation, but maybe not the cause.

 

It's the closest thing he's felt to hope in a long time. Maybe—maybe if his father had treatment, maybe if there was some sort of support system in place, maybe if he got the right medications, and he's ex-military, so surely there are programs to help—

 

And then...

 

And  _then_ .

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

"He wasn't an educated man. I hope that's clear."

 

"Abundantly so."

 

"He thought—I was sixteen, right, and that's the age of consent in Louisiana, so. So he wanted proof."

 

"Proof of—?”

 

“My—I don't know. Proof that I was into it? That I consented? He had this whole thing about thinking I was always on the verge of telling the cops. I couldn't join clubs after school because he was afraid I'd tell a teacher. I couldn't go over to any friends' houses, in case their parents asked  _questions_ . He was so convinced I’d turn him in, no matter what I said, so...I guess he wanted something to hold against me if I did."

 

"Were you?"

 

"Jesus,  _no_ . No one gave a shit. This happened all over my town, Hannibal. I mean, obviously not to  _everyone_ , but enough. Kid I was friends with in grade school got drowned by his momma in the bathtub for cryin' too loud, you know, and he was maybe eight? You were lucky to make it out alive. Didn't have much time to worry about being intact."

 

"So he...videotaped you."

 

"Drugged me and taped...taped  _us_ . Yeah. Like I said, he wasn't educated. I mean, I didn't really even think about it until I was in the Academy, how all he'd really done was implicate himself.

 

"And. I was just, I was stoned out of my mind and scared to death and, and I was crying and bleeding and I—I don't know, I snapped. Broke my mother's bedroom door down and demanded that she do something to help me. My mother, who was bedridden and  _dying in front of me_ , and all I could do was scream for her to stop him. I was bigger than she was by that point."

 

"It is a parent's obligation to protect their young. She had ample opportunity when you were much smaller, I think. You have no reason to blame yourself for the fact that she chose not to take it.”

 

"It was the last thing I said to her. I stole her wallet and I walked out the door and I just—“

 

"Kept going."

 

"Kept  going  .”

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's a girl that finds him eventually, shivering and wandering blank-eyed through the brush towards the sound of flowing water like a selkie instinctively trying to slip back into the sea. He's nearly made it to the river at that point, and he hasn't managed to make up his mind whether he intends to follow it or walk straight into it when, from behind him—

 

"Hey man, I've been following you for like, ten minutes now? So I'm gonna go ahead and introduce myself before this gets any weirder. Hi," she says, and stumbles down a tangle of roots to the concrete he stands on. 

 

She’s a tiny little thing, a good head shorter than Will himself, positively drowning in oversized layers of black and grey. Her jeans are torn and stitched back together inexpertly, her hoodie faded the sort of grey that speaks of exposure, not age. She stands probably an inch taller than she actually is in a clunky pair of battered combat boots, the laces mismatched and tied together in half a dozen places. A little tawny mutt without a leash trots after her. Neither of them smell great, but she smiles wide when she reaches him and holds out a black-nailed hand for him to shake. Obedient as a dog, automatic, he does. ”I’m Shiloh."

 

He blinks at her muzzily, still trying to process the  _following you_ portion of her greeting. When he speaks, it tastes dusty and sounds worse, like he's been wandering dry-mouthed for hours. 

 

Maybe he has.

 

"Shiloh. Like the county?"

 

She bares her teeth at him in a smile. "Shiloh like the  _battle_ ," she corrects, tosses her dreads, and barks out a laugh at what must have been a startled expression on his face. "What, your daddy didn't like military history? I thought all southern guys had a thing for it."

 

Will shakes his head. "My daddy didn't like much of anything. Whiskey, maybe," he hears himself mutter and Shiloh-like-the-battle nods slow like she understands.

 

(Later, much later, months later, when he strips off her heavy jacket and unlaces her boots and sees the constellations of old cigarette burns littering the brown skin under her t-shirt for the first time, he will realize that she really, really does.)

 

"Well, this is a shit place to sleep anyways," she says after a moment, her fingers curling absent in the honey-brown fur of the dog leaned against her leg. It closes its eyes, panting happily in a patch of sunlight slotting though the leaves and Will realizes they are somehow in a concrete underpass without his noticing. She jerks a thumb at a bright splash of graffiti on the wall behind her. "Used to be a pick up spot for hookers off the highway, I think. Lot lizards smart enough to stay away from the lots, right? Cops are always up our asses when we stop here, so I wouldn't hang around if I was you." She blinks. "Unless you're a hooker, in which case—I‘m really sorry for being rude and carry on, I guess."

 

Will snorts. "Do I  _look_ like a hooker?" He makes a jerky kind of gesture at his dirty plaid shirt, jeans smeared with engine oil, heavy work boots crusted in red dirt. He's willing to bet his black eye hasn't faded even to a soft green yet, and there's some stripes from Dad's belt blistering across his back miserably still in the relative cool of the spring air that she can't even see. 

 

He smells awful. He looks worse. His pupils are blown, he’s probably sweating. He  _knows_ he's shaking.

 

She tilts her head considering. "In the eyes, yeah, kinda," she says eventually. "You also look like you're coming down from some pretty bad shit."

 

Will laughs. It feels like he's grinding glass between his teeth. Feels like it's in his gums and in his soft palette and all down his throat, slicing him open again every time he swallows. He wonders absently how much blood he could ingest before it made him sick. "Dunno what," he slurs. "It was in a beer. Can't really walk great though."

 

"Yeah, I can see that. You look pretty busted up. Whatcha got on you?"

 

"Uh." He fumbles at his pockets and produces his mother's slim wallet. "Like, twenty bucks." He checks and counts it twice; his vision is stubbornly refusing to stay still long enough to actually read the numbers. “Twenty-six," he corrects.

 

"Not even a jacket? It's getting pretty cold at night." She's wearing this massive black military affair herself, one that hangs on her razor frame like a tent. She’s rolled up the sleeves enough to keep them out of her way, and decorated it with what seem to be patterns in a rough, unprofessional embroidery interspersed with sloppy white-out. 

 

He blinks a few times and the patterns resolve themselves into letters. They're probably bands, he realizes, though nothing he's ever heard of, aggressive combinations of spiky letters in a clearly-handmade script.She's wearing a dog collar, pink leather with scuffed silver studs and a heart-shaped tag reading simply fuck!, and he tries his best not to look at it. He tugs up the collar of his own shirt as surreptitiously as possible to cover the wide band of scar tissue. He's pretty sure she notices.

 

Her dog, by contrast, is wearing a faded red bandanna and a sleepy, pleased expression. Will notes that the animal, though its paws are muddy and its fur studded with burrs, seems to be in good health; its teeth are white, coat thick and glossy, single remaining eye bright and aware.

 

"No jacket," he confirms when he realizes he's been staring at them for probably longer than is socially acceptable. He hunches his shoulders. "Sorry."

 

She reaches out and whaps him lightly on the side of the head. 

 

He flinches at the sharp movement and she clearly sees it, but she doesn't pause. Doesn't hurt him, obviously, but doesn't stop herself from making contact, not even when he sucks in a sharp little breath at the blissful chemical swelling at bare skin touching his. He whimpers. He wants, and it’s awful.

 

It’s followed immediately by a wave of roiling nausea, panic and  _runrunrun_ hammering in the dead center of his ribcage. She says, strict, as he shrinks back from her, "Don't fuckin'  _apologize_ , come on. Hold your head up. You can't pull that kicked-dog shit out here. You got somewhere to slink back to, mutt?"

 

Red-faced, he shakes his head.

 

"Okay. So you've got twenty—sorry, twenty- _six_ bucks and a clear case of the crazies and hey, has anyone ever told you that you could model?" She reaches out for him again and this time, runs a gentle hand down his jaw, slow enough that he has time to pull away. He huffs out a noise of surprise, but doesn't move. "Because you are  _pretty_ , my friend. And that'd be just great if you actually were a hooker, but since that's not something you're considering...?" Here she pauses and waits for his jerky agreement before she continues, "right, so that face isn't gonna do you any favors on the tracks. Can you grow a beard? You should  _really_ try to grow a beard. Maybe get some tattoos. You don't even have a dog, you asshole."

 

“I—" he swallows once, hard, and bites back the apology. "Yeah, I, uh—I didn't exactly plan this out."

 

"No shit." She shoves her hands into her pockets and rocks back on the heels of her chunky black boots. “I’ve…look, I’ve got my crew holed up in a squat about a mile down the creek," she says. She pronounces it  _crick_ . "It's safer than being out here on your own, 'specially while you're sweating out whatever you're on. We take turns on watch at night so no one can sneak up on us and snatch our gear. That was my idea." She grins. "Got it from  _Lord of the Rings_ . You ever read that?"

 

He nods. "Yeah, in middle school," he distantly hears himself volunteering. "And  _The Hobbit_ . I, uh, I liked them." 

 

She raises both eyebrows and whistles a low note. "Well alright, Mutt, we could use another slightly educated mind knockin’ around. My guys are—they’re sweethearts, I love 'em, but they ain't always the brightest. You're not, like—“ she grimaces. "It's a dick thing to ask, I know, but are you the kind of crazy we're gonna have to keep watch  _for_ ?"

 

It's a fair question. She's come across a strange boy in the middle of nowhere, out of his mind on something he can't name, clearly not even a week out from some kind of encounter that left his eye blacked and his lip split, so it's pretty reasonable for her to want to know if there's a chance he'll slit their throats in their sleep. The thought of touching her beyond seeking that warm spark of actual human contact, though, just the idea of raising a hand with the intent to strike at this little slip of a thing with her bright eyes and all her crooked-sharp animal teeth makes him abruptly queasy. He clenches his hands into fists and tries to choke out something past the shredded lining of his throat.

 

"Shit," she says, and pats him awkwardly on the shoulder. "Hey, hey, I didn't mean nothing by it. Don't start crying on me now."

 

"Smart," he husks out, and drops his gaze to the mat of pine needles littering the concrete beneath the soles of his boots. "You're right to ask. I've never—I’ve never hurt anyone. Else."

 

"Man,  _I've_ hurt someone else. Many someones," she laughs. "Long as you have the ability to draw a clear line between  _friend_ and  _enemy_ , we're solid." She tilts her head again, and her short little dreadlocks flop up in a sort of messy mohawk, the metal beads scattered throughout clicking together gently. She reminds him a little of a bird. ”Sometimes you gotta fight," she offers. "Sometimes, you got no other options." She ruffles the dog's ears and Will notices for the first time the thick bands of scarring striping the dog's muzzle and neck.

 

(She's a small pit mix, he finds out later, a bait dog in her previous life, and Will wonders for awhile why a girl as tiny as Shiloh wouldn't have a big bruiser of an animal instead. It would make more sense, he's sure, up until he sees her hoist the animal into her rucksack to hop a train marked  _NBD_ for  _Northbound_ in glaring green on three successive cars.)

 

Will nods without really consciously choosing to. "Y-yeah. I guess so. I, uh—I won’t hurt you, though. Promise."

 

She snorts. "Ain't  _me_ I'm worried about. What are you, a hundred twenty pounds soaking wet? I got some kids in my crew who aren't so full-sized yet is all." She turns and crooks a hand back at him, waves for him to follow her. "But hey, you seem like an alright dude. Come on. Dinner should be done by now."

 

He tucks his wallet back into his pocket and his hands into the hollows of his armpits. She doesn’t look back to see if he’s still just standing there.

 

Hunched against the cold wind blowing off the water, he follows her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> runaways, traveling kids, kids making poor decisions, unsafe sex, underage drinking, underage drug use, Will's dad bad touches him a bunch and Will is Done.
> 
> If you don't know what gutter punks/train kids/traveling kids/crustpunks are, this is a p dece overview.


End file.
